Book: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Quotes of Book: The Man Who Mistook His Wife
For 'wellness', naturally, is no cause for complaint – people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill – not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness', or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'. book-quoteDay by day, week by week, the dreams, the visions, came oftener, grew deeper. They were not occasional now, but occupied most of the day. We would see her rapt, as if in a trance, her eyes sometimes closed, sometimes open but unseeing, and always a faint, mysterious smile on her face. If any one approached her, or asked her something, as the nurses had to do, she would respond at once, lucidly and courteously, but there was, even among the most down-to-earth staff, a feeling that she was in another world, and that we should not interrupt her. I shared this feeling and, though curious, was reluctant to probe. Once, just once, I said: 'Bhagawhandi, what is happening?' 'I am dying,' she answered. 'I am going home. I am going back where I came from – you might call it my return.' Another week passed, and now Bhagawhandi no longer responded to external stimuli, but seemed wholly enveloped in a world of her own, and, though her eyes were closed, her face still bore its faint, happy smile. 'She's on the return journey,' the staff said. 'She'll soon be there.' Three days later she died – or should we say she 'arrived', having completed her passage to India? book-quoteOur efforts to 're-connect' William all fail – even increase his confabulatory pressure. But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there, in his quietness, he recovers his own quiet. The presence of others, other people, excites and rattles him, forces him into an endless, frenzied, social chatter, a veritable delirium of identity-making and -seeking; the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allows this identity-delirium to relax, to subside; and by its quiet, non-human self-sufficiency and completeness allows him a rare quietness and self-sufficiency of his own, by offering {beneath, or beyond, all merely human identities and relations} a deep wordless communion with Nature itself, and with this the restored sense of being in the world, being real. book-quotethey do not 'convert' numbers into music, but actually feel them, in themselves, as 'forms', as 'tones', like the multitudinous forms that compose nature itself. They are not calculators, and their numeracy is 'iconic'. They summon up, they dwell among, strange scenes of numbers; they wander freely in great landscapes of numbers; they create, dramaturgically, a whole world made of numbers. They have, I believe, a most singular imagination – and not the least of its singularities is that it can imagine only numbers. They do not seem to 'operate' with numbers, non-iconically, like a calculator; they 'see' them, directly, as a vast natural scene. And book-quote
