The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (44-154)

When you need to document your outside reading, but you don't have a blog post due, create a post with just a title. The body can be entirely blank. When Mr. Proctor looks at the titles of all your blog posts, the pages documented should add up to at least 200.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (23-43)

Each chapter in this fascinating book is about a different patient studied by Dr. Sacks, a neurologist. This chapter is about someone with amnesia, who doesn't remember anything past his nineteenth birthday, even though he's an old man. In this excerpt, Dr. Sacks is interviewing the man for the first time.

'What year is this, Mr. G.?' I asked, concealing my perplexity under a casual manner.

'Forty-five, man. What do you mean?' He went on, 'We've won the war, FDR's dead, Truman's at the helm. There are great times ahead.'

'And you, Jimmie, how old would you be?'

Oddly, uncertainly, he hesitated a moment, as if engaged in calculation.

'Why, I guess I'm nineteen, Doc. I'll be twenty next birthday.'

Looking at the grey-haired man before me, I had an impulse for which I have never forgiven myself--it was, or would have been, the height of cruelty, had there been any possibility of Jimmie's remembering it.

'Here,' I said, and thrust a mirror toward him. 'Look in the mirror and tell me what you see. Is that a nineteen-year-old looking out from the mirror?'

He suddenly turned ashen and gripped the sides of his chair. 'Jesus Christ,' he whispered. 'Christ, what's going on? What's happened to me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?'--and he became frantic, panicked. (25)

What I find so fascinating and scary about this anecdote is how it shows what happens when we lose our memory. People are their memories, and Jimmie has been nobody for the last fifty years. What would it be like to have this kind of amnesia? It would probably be just the same as it is for the rest of us--Jimmy has no idea he's different until the doctor asks him to look in the mirror, and he immediately forgets about. Within a few minutes, he's happy again, a nineteen-year-old with a bright future ahead of him.

Another question I'm thinking about is whether the doctor's action was indeed cruel. If Jimmy is indeed nobody, than this was not cruelty. If Jimmy is nobody now, then is there any point to his continued living? Does his life have any meaning now? These seem like questions that will be answered differently depending on whether you believe in anything transcendent. If you think people's lives matter because people matter to themselves, or because people matter to each other, then (assuming Jimmy has no family) you might conclude that Jimmy as a person no longer exists. He's just a memory of himself. But if you think people matter because they matter to God or whatever you believe in, then you'll probably say Jimmy is still just as valuable as anybody else.

Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. New York: Touchstone, 1985.

Siddhartha (3-25)

If it helps, you might want to label the parts of your blog posts. Each post needs:

• Context: A little summary of what's happening, so we can understand the quotation
• A quotation: Anywhere from a few lines to a paragraph from your book.
• Questions: You need to respond to your quotation in some way. The easiest way to do this is to ask a few questions about it and then answer the questions. You may ask literal, interpretive, or thematic questions (you don't need one of each). More advanced posts might not actually have the questions written out, but the topic sentence of each paragraph is still asking a question implicitly.

CONTEXT:

This is from the very beginning of the book. I don't know much about what is going on except that Siddhartha is a boy who seems to have a pretty happy life. His parents love him, he has a close friend, and he is good at his schoolwork. This is the first time that it seems like he might not be completely happy with his life.

QUOTATION:

Siddhartha had begun to feel the seeds of discontent within him. He had begun to feel that the love of his father and mother, and also the love of his friend Govinda, would not always make him happy, give him peace, satisfy and suffice him. He had begun to suspect that his worthy father and his other teachers, the wise Brahmins, had already passed on to him the bulk and bets of their wisdom, that they had already poured the sum total of their knowledge into his waiting vessel; that the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still. (5)

QUESTIONS:

Literal: What parts of himself did Siddhartha think might not be fully satisfied?

Siddhartha thinks his intellect, his soul, and his heart are not what they could be.

Interpretive: How might Siddhartha feel about this lack of fullness?

I imagine that he might feel a bit of resentment, because he expects the adults in his life to provide him everything he needs, and he's starting to realize that they are not going to provide that to him. It's possible Siddhartha also feels guilt. Since he knows that his family is doing their best for him, and that he's lucky to have so much love, he might feel guilty that he doesn't feel satisfied. Or maybe he just feels a little bit of teenage restlessness, a need to get away from the predictable life that has been prepared for him and discover life on his own terms.

Thematic: Does everybody feel, at some point, like there must be something more to life?

I'm really not sure. I know that I have definitely felt this way at times, particularly when I have felt like my life is too routine, like I'm missing out on a lot of fun by being too responsible. Strangely, though, I have also felt like there must be something more at times when life is so great that there's nothing left to wish for. Maybe people need to always want something more, and when they are allowed to have anything they want, they get freaked out because they still don't feel satisfied.

Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. New York: Bantam, 1951.