Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 14th, 2015 12:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
A. R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound, which I don’t think is meant to be inutterably depressing. In the preface, Luria states that “this is a book about a person who fought with the tenacity of the damned to recover the use of his damaged brain. Though in many respects he remained as helpless as before, in the long run he won his fight.”
Which sounds inspiring, right? But I am hard-pressed to see any way in which Zasetsky (the titular man with the shattered world) won any kind of fight at all. The book ends twenty-five years after he was first injured, and he’s still in constant physical agony and emotional distress, still tormented by his massive difficulties in communicating with other people.
And these difficulties are never going to get better. It’s not just that the odds are hopelessly against him. The odds are 100% against him. He is not going to regain the brain function that he is struggling so hard to regain any more than a man with an amputated leg is going to grow a new leg. His injuries are such that there isn’t (or wasn’t when Luria was writing, maybe things have changed) even a brain-injury version of a prosthesis for him.
I guess from a certain point of view his determination to keep fighting might be inspiring, but mostly it just seems incredibly sad to me. It’s not clear to me that he understands that this fight is hopeless; it’s not even clear that he’s even capable of understanding that concept. And he’s just really sad and miserable and spends all his time struggling to write this account about how his brain injuries and resulting aphasia (among other symptoms) makes him sad and miserable and cut off from everyone else and the only thing that makes his life worthwhile is the hope that someday he'll get better. Which he never will.
What I’m Reading Now
Eugenia Ginzburg’s Within the Whirlwind, which I just started. It’s less soul-crushing than The Man with a Shattered World. Who knew that an account of gulag life could ever be less soul-crushing than anything?
What I Plan to Read Next
I also have Luria’s The Making of Mind, which is an autobiography/memoir about Soviet psychology, and presumably has to be less immiserating than The Man with a Shattered World, if only because if it was more so than it might actually spontaneously combust on the shelves.
...I might read something else first, though. Just in case.
A. R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound, which I don’t think is meant to be inutterably depressing. In the preface, Luria states that “this is a book about a person who fought with the tenacity of the damned to recover the use of his damaged brain. Though in many respects he remained as helpless as before, in the long run he won his fight.”
Which sounds inspiring, right? But I am hard-pressed to see any way in which Zasetsky (the titular man with the shattered world) won any kind of fight at all. The book ends twenty-five years after he was first injured, and he’s still in constant physical agony and emotional distress, still tormented by his massive difficulties in communicating with other people.
And these difficulties are never going to get better. It’s not just that the odds are hopelessly against him. The odds are 100% against him. He is not going to regain the brain function that he is struggling so hard to regain any more than a man with an amputated leg is going to grow a new leg. His injuries are such that there isn’t (or wasn’t when Luria was writing, maybe things have changed) even a brain-injury version of a prosthesis for him.
I guess from a certain point of view his determination to keep fighting might be inspiring, but mostly it just seems incredibly sad to me. It’s not clear to me that he understands that this fight is hopeless; it’s not even clear that he’s even capable of understanding that concept. And he’s just really sad and miserable and spends all his time struggling to write this account about how his brain injuries and resulting aphasia (among other symptoms) makes him sad and miserable and cut off from everyone else and the only thing that makes his life worthwhile is the hope that someday he'll get better. Which he never will.
What I’m Reading Now
Eugenia Ginzburg’s Within the Whirlwind, which I just started. It’s less soul-crushing than The Man with a Shattered World. Who knew that an account of gulag life could ever be less soul-crushing than anything?
What I Plan to Read Next
I also have Luria’s The Making of Mind, which is an autobiography/memoir about Soviet psychology, and presumably has to be less immiserating than The Man with a Shattered World, if only because if it was more so than it might actually spontaneously combust on the shelves.
...I might read something else first, though. Just in case.
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no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 04:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 05:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 06:27 am (UTC)I do think we don't know much about the brain, and more things may be possible than we know, but it doesn't sound as if that's what the author is stressing.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 02:33 pm (UTC)But it's still misery and it's hard to see Zasetsky's struggle to write pages anatomizing his problems as anything but the thinnest of silver linings on a cloud. I guess it's good that it gives him some sense of purpose and meaning in life.
silver slivers
Date: 2015-10-14 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 03:03 pm (UTC)ETA: It's actually a very interesting book, so it might still be worth reading even though it's soul-crushing. Just, you know. Expect your soul to be crushed.