must be Italian

Dr. Oliver Sacks, more than any other thinker or writer, has continually delighted and challenged my preconceptions. For multiple reasons--I had been asked by our school librarian to blurb my favorite book, a student is interested for speech, yesterday's posting on the personality-destroying parasite--I picked up The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat again, and plowed through several chapters.

The mind is so fragile, personality so malleable by circumstance... We speak of a unified personality existing over time because it seems, to us, that we are always "us," no matter the changes. But that seemingly inviolable unity can be torn apart by disease. Sacks, with a keen eye and poetic prose, identifies case after case testing the boundaries of normal human experience.

...Mr. Thompson would identify me--misidentify, pseudo-identify me--as a dozen different people in the course of five minutes. He would whirl, fluently, from one guess, one hypothesis, one belief, to the next, without any appearance of uncertainty at any point--he never knew who I was, or what and where he was, an ex-grocer, with severe Korsakov's, in a neurological institution.

He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds.... For Mr. Thompson, however, it was not a tissue of ever-changing, evanescent fantasies and illusion, but a wholly normal, stable, and factual world. So far as he was concerned, there was nothing the matter.

A kaleidoscope of memories and sensations, shaped somehow into a coherent narrative that defines the Self--shattered.

The mind's connection to its own physical body-reality, too, can be severed, to strange effect.

"Look at it!" he cried, with revulsion on his face. "Have you ever seen such a creepy, horrible thing?..." He seized it with both hands, with extraordinary violence, and tried to tear it off his body, and, failing, punched it in an access of rage.

"Easy!" I said. "Be calm! Take it easy! I wouldn't punch that leg like that."

"And why not?" he asked, irritably, belligerently.

"Because it's your leg," I answered. "Don't you know your own leg?"...

"It looks like nothing on earth. How can a thing like that belong to me? I don't know where a thing like that belongs..." His voice trailed off. He looked terrified and shocked.

You may not be exactly who you think you are--and tomorrow, you may be somebody else. You simply must read this philosophically challenging book.