Great Throughts Treasury

"A quiet despair!"

"A spectacular anomaly came up with the hydrides of the nonmetals?an ugly bunch, about as inimical to life as one could get. Arsenic and antimony hydrides were very poisonous and smelly; silicon and phosphorous hydrides were spontaneously inflammable. I had made in my lab the hydrides of sulfur (H2S), selenium (H2Se), and tellurium (H2Te), all Group VI elements, all dangerous and vile-smelling gases. The hydride of oxygen, the first Group VI element, one might predict by analogy, would be a foul-smelling, poisonous, inflammable gas, too, condensing to a nasty liquid around ?100øC. And instead it was water, H2O?stable, potable, odorless, benign, and with a host of special, indeed unique properties (its expansion when frozen, its great heat capacity, its capacity as an ionizing solvent, etc.) which made it indispensable to our watery planet, indispensable to life itself. What made it such an anomaly? [?] (This question, I found, had only been resolved recently, in the 1930s, with Linus Pauling's delineation of the hydrogen bond.)"

"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."

"And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan...Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive ?cry?). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals?my old and valued friends?Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten."

"About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations."

"And language... is not just another faculty or skill. It is what makes thought possible, what separates thought from non-thought, what separates the human from the no- human."

"And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved?never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth."

"As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness, is solitude...Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself."

"Any disease introduces duplication in life: an it with their own needs, requirements and limitations."

"And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ?A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.? Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely."

"At 11, I could say ?I am sodium? (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold."

"Astounded?and indifferent?for he was a man who, in effect, had no ?day before?."

"But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr. P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?"

"But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess? that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be: and to study or influence these means, no less than the primary insult to the nervous system, is an essential part of our role as physicians."

"But who was more tragic, or who was more damned?the man who knew it, or the man who did not?"

"At the end of our visit, Fleisher agreed to play something on my piano, a beautiful old 1894 Bechstein concert grand that I had grown up with, my father's piano. Fleisher sat at the piano and carefully, tenderly, stretched each finger in turn, and then, with arms and hands almost flat, he started to play. He played a piano transcription of Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze, as arranged for piano by Egon Petri. Never in its 112 years, I thought, had this piano been played by such a master-I had the feeling that Fleisher has sized up the piano's character and perhaps its idiosyncrasies within seconds, that he had matched his playing to the instrument, to bring out its greatest potential, its particularity. Fleisher seemed to distill the beauty, drop by drop, like an alchemist, into flowing notes of an almost unbearable beauty-and, after this, there was nothing more to be said."

"Clothed in the sense of ecstasy, burning a deep philosophical meaning and divine, Hildegard's visions have helped to guide her to a life of holiness and mysticism worship. They are a unique example for how a physiological event, banal, bad or meaningless to most people, can become, in a privileged consciousness, the substrate of a supreme ecstatic inspiration. To find a suitable parallel, we must turn to Dostoevsky, living sometimes ecstatic epileptic auras which give them important significance: There are moments that lasts only five or six seconds, you feel the presence of eternal harmony ... a formidable thing is terrible clarity that manifests and excitement that you fill. If this condition would last longer than five seconds, the soul could not endure and it should disappear. During these five seconds live a whole human existence, and for that I would die without me even think they pay too expensive ..."

"Certainly it's not just a visual experience - it's an emotional one. In an informal way I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive to words and disoriented and out of it. I think that recognition of visual art can be very deep."

"Completing my life, whatever that means I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever trying to complete my life means."

"Dangerously well?? what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the double-ness, the paradox, of feeling ?too well"

"Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape"

"Darwin speculated that music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music."

"During the war the congregation was largely broken up [?] and it was never really reconstituted after the war...Before the war my parents (I, too) had known almost every shop and shopkeeper in Cricklewood? and I would see them all in their places in shul. But all this was shattered with the impact of the war, and then with the rapid postwar social changes in our corner of London. I myself, traumatized at Braefield, had lost touch with, lost interest in, the religion of my childhood. I regret that I was to lose it as early and as abruptly as I did, and this feeling of sadness or nostalgia was strangely admixed with a raging atheism, a sort of fury with God for not existing, not taking care, not preventing the war, but allowing it, and all its horrors, to occur."

"Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers."

"Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational."

"For [researchers] in the early twentieth century, memories were imprints in the brain (as for Socrates they were analogous to impressions made in soft wax) ? imprints that could be activated by the act of recollection. It was not until the crucial studies of Frederic Bartlett at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s that the classical view could be disputed. Whereas Ebbinghaus and other early investigators had studied rote memory ? how many digits could be remembered, for instance ? Bartlett presented his subjects with pictures or stories and accounts of what they had seen or heard were somewhat different (and sometimes quite transformed) on each re-remembering. These experiments convinced Bartlett to think in terms not of a static thing called ?memory,? but rather a dynamic process of ?remembering.? He wrote:"

"For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing - and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him."

"First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience."

"Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination."

"He wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'."

"Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations."

"Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too."

"Hallucinations can occur in full consciousness, unlike dreams, and they are projected externally and appear to have a real and objective reality, unlike imagined objects and people. They are similar to percepts (objects of perception) except they are, as it were, forced percepts in which there?s nothing there to perceive. It?s as if the perceiving parts of the brain have been forcefully activated internally."

"I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it."

"I never heard [my parents] talk between themselves about Palestine or Zionism, and I suspected they had no strong convictions on the subject, at least until after the war, when the horror of the Holocaust made them feel there should be a ?National Home.? I felt they were bullied by the organizers of these meetings, and by the gangster-like evangelists who would pound at the front door and demand large sums for yeshivas or ?schools in Israel.? My parents, clearheaded and independent in most other ways, seemed to become soft and helpless in the face of these demands, perhaps driven by a sense of obligation or anxiety. My own feelings [?] were passionately negative: I came to hate Zionism and evangelism and politicking of every sort, which I regarded as noisy and intrusive and bullying."

"I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means."

"I opened the door-what a freedom was this, for in the hospital there was no liberty to come and go-and stood, for a minute, in the soft air, savoring its fineness and the sweet smell of woods, and seeing in the distance the nightglow of London, city of cities, my mother."

"I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over."

"I think hallucinations need to be discussed. There are all sorts of hallucinations, and then many sorts which are okay, like the ones I think which most of us have in bed at night before we fall asleep, when we can see all sorts of patterns or faces and scenes."

"I think that seeing letters and numbers in color or seeing music in color is really a constant physiological happening between two areas of the cortex, a letter-reading one and a color-constructing one. I think this sort of thing, which you can probably verify from your own experience, comes at an early age, and doesn?t change. I suppose one might call it an illusion, in that one sensation is invested with the qualities of another sensation. This can take very complex forms. There?s one professional musician who could taste different pitches?she tuned her violin by taste."

"I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know."

"If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self?himself?he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it."

"If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to."

"I was set apart, we were set apart, we patients in white nightgowns, and avoided clearly, though unconsciously, like lepers."

"If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique."

"If we want to know so and so we ask: What's his story - the story of the real deeper? - Because every one of us is a biography and a story. Every one of us is a unique tale of constantly being installed and unconsciously by us and through us and in us through our perceptions and our feelings and our thoughts and our actions, and not least by our conversation and our stories spoken. We do not disagree much about each other biologically and physiologically, but historically."

"Idly, but not idle-for in leisure there is neither idleness nor haste-I watched the slow wreathing of smoke, into the still air, from my pipe."

"If we have youth, beauty, blessed gifts, strength, if we find fame, fortune, favor, fulfillment, it is easy to be nice, to turn a warm heart to the world."

"In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life."

"If you were a man or a kind man, he knows he has a man or in kind. But if it has a soul - the same - it could not be known, because it is no longer there to know."