Nietzsche’s near industrial-scale productivity and efficiency came with a cost — or was it a benefit? — to how he thought and wrote before. Blindness forced him to stop writing longhand with pen and ink and instead use his fingertips to identify the fixed arrangement of letters on the Malling-Hansen writing ball. Inevitably, the grammar of the mechanical writing ball overrode the schooled grammar of longhand writing and the thought that it produced. The sudden mechanical punctuated strike of the typewriter contrasted starkly with the ruminative flow of the pen; the typewriter encouraged a binary decision, to depress the key or not; whereas the pen with its store of liquid ink, held by surface tension in the nib, or in a small reservoir in the fountain pen, was a more latent and nonmachinic technology. The first is an incipiently digital form of thought expression, the second more innately analog; one the beginning of the forming of what literacy theorist Maryanne Wolf would call the “digital brain,” the other a brain formed in print culture and in the Romantic ambivalence toward science, Enlightenment, and machines.
This will seem odd at first, but bear with me. There are smartphone apps that can help you decide between two options by harnessing the unpredictable quirks of quantum mechanics. But this is no ordinary coin toss, where randomness decides your fate. Instead, it guarantees that both choices become realities.
You open the app and request a measurement of a photon, which forces it to occupy a binary state, such as ‘spin up’ or ‘spin down’. In my case, ‘spin up’ meant accept the job and ‘spin down’ meant decline. You will see only one result but, in theory, another you will see the opposite, in a different universe. From that moment, two versions of you co-exist, living in parallel.
The puzzle of consciousness seems to be giving science a run for its money. The problem, to be clear, isn’t merely to pinpoint “where it all happens” in the brain (although this, too, is far from trivial). The real mystery is how to bridge the gap between the mental, first-person stuff of consciousness and the physical lump of matter inside the cranium.
Leftovers, eaten the day after, or maybe late the night of, are the best part of Thanksgiving. The performance of the big meal is done, the mood has relaxed, the more distasteful guests are long gone. You are neither a host nor a guest: you are a person alone with her refrigerator, her appetite, and her creativity. The Thanksgiving-leftovers sandwich is a continuation of the holiday ritual, the festive meal’s third and final act: after preparation and presentation comes a dénouement of sandwichification. Two slices of bread (or a split roll, or a biscuit; let’s not fuss), is nature’s ideal vehicle for leftovers. Cold cuts, after all, were, in their original form, the slices of meat people ate once what remained of a roast had gone cold.
Such memory blanks are puzzling enough for me, but even more so for those close to me, who note this absentee quality in my mode of being and occasionally, rightfully, feel derailed by it, almost betrayed. I am both here and elsewhere, present and absent: now I see you, now I don’t.
I didn’t tell my husband that I retained no memory of our earlier Sifnos trip. I knew it would make him feel lonely, like he’d been living with a ghost.
This brave memoir by a psychiatrist who has severe mental illness shows how lost and confused psychiatry and its patients have become. Future readers will be amazed, we must hope, by how poorly we understood and how ineffectively we treated the troubled mind.