Man Who MIstook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks Read Free Book Online

If there were many steps, too much time, involved, he would forget where he was, and even the question. He knew the elements, compared them,
       and drew the periodic table-but omitted the transuranic elements.
       'Is that complete?' I asked when he'd finished.
       'It's complete and up-to-date, sir, as far as I know.'
       'You wouldn't know any elements beyond uranium?'
       'You kidding? There's ninety-two elements, and uranium's the last.'
       I paused and flipped through a National Geographic on the table. 'Tell me the planets,' I said, 'and something about them.' Unhesitatingly, confidently, he gave me the planets-their names, their discovery, their distance from the sun, their estimated mass, character, and gravity.
       'What is this?' I asked, showing him a photo in the magazine I was holding.
       'It's the moon,' he replied.
       'No, it's not,' I answered. 'It's a picture of the earth taken from the moon.'
       'Doc, you're kidding! Someone would've had to get a camera up there!'
       'Naturally.'
       'Hell! You're joking-how the hell would you do that?'
       Unless he was a consummate actor, a fraud simulating an astonishment he did not feel, this was an utterly convincing demonstration that he was still in the past. His words, his feelings, his innocent wonder, his struggle to make sense of what he saw, were precisely those of an intelligent young man in the forties faced with the future, with what had not yet happened, and what was scarcely imaginable. 'This more than anything else,' I wrote in my notes, 'persuades me that his cut-off around 1945 is genuine . . . What I showed him, and told him, produced the authentic amazement which it would have done in an intelligent young man of the pre-Sputnik era.'
       I found another photo in the magazine and pushed it over to him.
       'That's an aircraft carrier,' he said. 'Real ultramodern design. I never saw one quite like that.'
       'What's it called?' I asked.
       He glanced down, looked baffled, and said, 'The Nimitzl'
       'Something the matter?'
       'The hell there is!' he replied hotly. 'I know 'em all by name, and I don't know a Nimitz … Of course there's an Admiral Nimitz, but I never heard they named a carrier after him.'
       Angrily he threw the magazine down.
       He was becoming fatigued, and somewhat irritable and anxious, under the continuing pressure of anomaly and contradiction, and their fearful implications, to which he could not be entirely oblivious. I had already, unthinkingly, pushed him into panic, and felt it was time to end our session. We wandered over to the window again, and looked down at the sunlit baseball diamond; as he looked his face relaxed, he forgot the Nimitz, the satellite photo, the other horrors and hints, and became absorbed in the game below. Then, as a savoury smell drifted up from the dining room, he smacked his lips, said 'Lunch!', smiled, and took his leave.
       And I myself was wrung with emotion-it was heartbreaking, it was absurd, it was deeply perplexing, to think of his life lost in limbo, dissolving.
       'He is, as it were,' I wrote in my notes, 'isolated in a single moment of being, with a moat or lacuna of forgetting all round him … He is man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.' And then, more prosaically, 'The remainder of the neurological examination is entirely normal. Impression: probably Korsakov's syndrome, due to alcoholic degeneration of the mammillary bodies.' My note was a strange mixture of facts and observations, carefully noted and itemised, with irrepressible meditations on what such problems might 'mean', in regard to who and what and where this poor man was-whether, indeed, one could speak of an 'existence', given so absolute a privation of memory or continuity.
       I kept wondering, in this and later notes-unscientifically- about 'a lost soul', and how one might establish some continuity,