Unaware—and indifferent. He seemed bland, placid, emptied of all feeling—it was this unnatural serenity that his Krishna brethren had perceived, apparently, as “bliss,” and indeed, at one point, Greg used the term himself. “How do you feel?” I returned to this again and again. “I feel blissful,” he replied at one point, “I am afraid of falling back into the material world.” At this point, when he was first in the hospital, many of his Hare Krishna friends would come to visit him; I often saw their saffron robes in the corridors. They would come to visit poor, blind, blank Greg and flock around him; they saw him as having achieved “detachment,” as an Enlightened One.
*
His tumor, a slow-growing one, was huge when it was finally removed in 1976, but only in the later stages of its growth, as it destroyed the memory system in the temporal lobe, would it actually have prevented the brain from registering new events. But Greg had difficulties—not absolute, but partial—even in remembering events from the late sixties, events that he must have registered perfectly at the time. So beyond the inability to register new experiences, there had been an erosion of existing memories (a retrograde amnesia) going back several years before his tumor had developed. There was not an absolutely sharp cutoff here, but rather a temporal gradient, so that figures and events from 1966 and 1967 were fully remembered, events from 1968 or 1969 partially or occasionally remembered, and events after 1970 almost never remembered.
*
This narrowed down the extent of his amnesia. He remembered songs vividly from 1964 to 1968. He remembered all the founding members of the Grateful Dead, from 1967. But he was unaware that Pigpen, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin were all dead. His memory cut off by 1970, or before. He was caught in the sixties, unable to move on. He was a fossil, the last hippie.
At first I did not want to confront Greg with the enormity of his time loss, his amnesia, or even to let involuntary hints through (which he would certainly pick up, for he was very sensitive to anomaly and tone), so I changed the subject and said, “Let me examine you.”
*
I had already had some sense of this when testing his memory, finding his confinement, in effect, to a single moment—“the present”—uninformed by any sense of a past (or a future). Given this radical lack of connection and continuity in his inner life, I got the feeling, indeed, that he might not have an inner life to speak of, that he lacked the constant dialogue of past and present, of experience and meaning, which constitutes consciousness and inner life for the rest of us. He seemed to have no sense of “next” and to lack that eager and anxious tension of anticipation, of intention, that normally drives us through life.
Some sense of ongoing, of “next,” is always with us. But this sense of movement, of happening, Greg lacked; he seemed immured, without knowing it, in a motionless, timeless moment. And whereas for the rest of us the present is given its meaning and depth by the past (hence it becomes the “remembered present,” in Gerald Edelman’s term), as well as being given potential and tension by the future, for Greg it was flat and (in its meager way) complete. This living-in-the-moment, which was so manifestly pathological, had been perceived in the temple as an achievement of higher consciousness.
Greg seemed to adjust to Williamsbridge with remarkable ease, considering he was a young man being placed, probably forever, in a hospital for the chronically ill. There was no furious defiance, no railing at Fate, no sense, apparently, of indignity or despair. Compliantly, indifferently, Greg let himself be put away in the backwater of Williamsbridge. When I asked him about this, he said, “I have no choice.” And this, as he said it, seemed wise and true. Indeed, he seemed eminently philosophical about it. But it was a philosophicalness made possible by his indifference, his brain damage.
His parents, so estranged from him when he was rebellious and well, came daily, doted on him, now that he was helpless and ill; and they, for their part, could be sure, at any time, that he would be at the hospital, smiling and grateful for their visit. If he was not “waiting” for them, so much the better—they could miss a day, or a few days, if they were away; he would not notice, but would be cordial as ever the next time they came.
*
Damage to the frontal lobes, in contrast, does not affect these, but produces a subtler and profounder disturbance of identity.
And it was this—rather than his blindness, or his weakness, or his disorientation, or his amnesia—that so horrified his parents when they finally saw Greg in 1975. It was not just that he was damaged, but that he was changed beyond recognition, had been “dispossessed,” in his father’s words, by a sort of simulacrum, or changeling, which had Greg’s voice and manner and humor and intelligence but not his “spirit” or “realness” or “depth”—a changeling whose wisecracking and levity formed a shocking counterpoint to the fearful gravity of what had happened.
*
If Greg was alone, in a corridor, he seemed scarcely alive; but as soon as he was in company, he was a different person altogether. He would “come to,” he would be funny, charming, ingenuous, sociable. Everyone liked him; he would respond to anyone at once, with a lightness and a humor and an absence of guile or hesitation; and if there was something too light or flippant or indiscriminate in his interactions and reactions, and if, moreover, he lost all memory of them in a minute, well, there were worse things; it was understandable, one of the results of his disease. Thus one was very aware, in a hospital for chronic patients like ours, a hospital where feelings of melancholy, of rage, and of hopelessness simmer and preside, of the virtue of a patient such as Greg—who never appeared to have bad moods, and who, when activated by others, was invariably cheerful, euphoric.
He seemed, in an odd way, and in consequence of his sickness, to have a sort of vitality or health—a cheeriness, an inventiveness, a directness, an exuberance, which other patients, and indeed the rest of us, found delightful in small doses. And where he had been so “difficult,” so tormented, so rebellious in his pre-Krishna days, all this anger and torment and angst now seemed to have vanished; he seemed to be at peace.
*
It seemed natural, at this time, given Greg’s blindness and the revelation of his potential for learning, that he should be given an opportunity to learn Braille. Arrangements were made with the Jewish Institute for the Blind for him to enter intensive training, four times a week. It should not have been a disappointment, nor indeed a surprise, that Greg was unwilling to learn any Braille—that he was startled and bewildered at finding this imposed on him, and cried out, “What’s going on? Do you think I’m blind? Why am I here, with blind people all around me?” Attempts were made to explain things to him, and he responded, with impeccable logic, “If I were blind, I would be the first person to know it.” The institute said they had never had such a difficult patient, and the project was quietly allowed to drop.
Oliver Sacks
An Anthropologist on Mars
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