The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

The man who mistook his wife for a hat.

OLIVER SACKS.

Preface.

The last thing one settles in writing a book," Pascal observes, "is what one should put in first." So, having written, collected and arranged these strange tales, having selected a t.i.tle and two epigraphs, I must now examine what I have done-and why.

The doubleness of the epigraphs, and the contrast between them-indeed, the contrast which Ivy McKenzie draws between the physician and the naturalist-corresponds to a certain doubleness in me: that I feel myself a naturalist and a physician both; and that I am equally interested in diseases and people; perhaps, too, that I am equally, if inadequately, a theorist and dramatist, am equally drawn to the scientific and the romantic, and continually see both in the human condition, not least in that quintessential human condition of sickness-animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.

My work, my life, is all with the sick-but the sick and their sickness drives me to thoughts which, perhaps, I might otherwise not have. So much so that I am compelled to ask, with Nietzsche: "As for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?"-and to see the questions it raises as fundamental in nature. Constantly my patients drive me to question, and constantly my questions drive me to patients-thus in the stories or studies which follow there is a continual movement from one to the other.

Studies, yes; why stories, or cases? Hippocrates introduced the historical conception of disease, the idea that diseases have a course, from their first intimations to their climax or crisis, and thence to their happy or fatal resolution. Hippocrates thus introduced the case history, a description, or depiction, of the natural history of disease-precisely expressed by the old word "pathology." Such histories are a form of natural history-but they tell us nothing about the individual and his history; they convey nothing of the person, and the experience of the person, as he faces, and struggles to survive, his disease. There is no "subject" in a narrow case history; modern case histories allude to the subject in a cursory phrase ("a trisomic albino female of 21"), which could as well apply to a rat as a human being. To restore the human subject at the centre-the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject-we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a "who" as well as a "what", a real person, a patient, in relation to disease-in relation to the physical.

The patient"s essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient"s personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of ident.i.ty cannot be disjoined. Such disorders, and their depiction and study, indeed entail a new discipline, which we may call the "neurology of ident.i.ty", for it deals with the neural foundations of the self, the age-old problem of mind and brain. It is possible that there must, of necessity, be a gulf, a gulf of category, between the psychical and the physical; but studies and stories pertaining simultaneously and inseparably to both-and it is these which especially fascinate me, and which (on the whole) I present here-may nonetheless serve to bring them nearer, to bring us to the very intersection of mechanism and life, to the relation of physiological processes to biography.

The tradition of richly human clinical tales reached a high point in the nineteenth century, and then declined, with the advent of an impersonal neurological science. Luria wrote: "The power to describe, which was so common to the great nineteenth-century neurologists and psychiatrists, is almost gone now. ... It must be revived." His own late works, such as The Mind of a Mnemonist and The Man with a Shattered World, are attempts to revive this lost tradition. Thus the case-histories in this book hark back to an ancient tradition: to the nineteenth-century tradition of which Luria speaks; to the tradition of the first medical historian, Hippocrates; and to that universal and prehistorical tradition by which patients have always told their stories to doctors.

Cla.s.sical fables have archetypal figures-heroes, victims, martyrs, warriors. Neurological patients are all of these-and in the strange tales told here they are also something more. How, in these mythical or metaphorical terms, shall we categorise the "lost Mariner", or the other strange figures in this book? We may say they are travellers to unimaginable lands-lands of which otherwise we should have no idea or conception. This is why their lives and journeys seem to me to have a quality of the fabulous, why I have used Osier"s Arabian Nights image as an epigraph, and why I feel compelled to speak of tales and fables as well as cases. The scientific and the romantic in such realms cry out to come together-Luria liked to speak here of "romantic science". They come together at the intersection of fact and fable, the intersection which characterises (as it did in my book Awakenings) the lives of the patients here narrated.

But what facts! What fables! To what shall we compare them? We may not have any existing models, metaphors or myths. Has the time perhaps come for new symbols, new myths?

Eight of the chapters in this book have already been published: "The Lost Mariner", "Hands", "The Twins", and "The Autist Artist" in the New York Review of Books (1984 and 1985), and "Witty Ticcy Ray", "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", and "Reminiscence" in the London Review of Books (1981, 1983, 1984)- where the briefer version of the last was called "Musical Ears". "On the Level" was published in The Sciences (1985). A very early account of one of my patients-the "original" of Rose R. in Awakenings and of Harold Pinter"s Deborah in A Kind of Alaska, inspired by that book-is to be found in "Incontinent Nostalgia" (originally published as "Incontinent Nostalgia Induced by L-Dopa" in the Lancet of Spring 1970). Of my four "Phantoms", the first two were published as "clinical curios" in the British Medical journal (1984). Two short pieces are taken from previous books: "The Man Who Fell out of Bed" is excerpted from A Leg to Stand On, and "The Visions of Hildegard" from Migraine. The remaining twelve pieces are unpublished and entirely new, and were all written during the autumn and winter of 1984.

I owe a very special debt to my editors: first to Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books and Mary-Kay Wilmers of the London Review of Books; then to Kate Edgar, Jim Silberman of Summit Rooks in New York, and Colin Haycraft of Duckworth"s in London, who between them did so much to shape the final book.

Among my fellow neurologists I must express special grat.i.tude to the late Dr James Purdon Martin, to whom I showed videotapes of "Christina" and "Mr MacGregor" and with whom I discussed these patients fully-"The Disembodied Lady" and "On the Level" express this indebtedness; to Dr Michael Kremer, my former "chief in London, who in response to A Leg to Stand On (1984) described a very similar case of his own-these are bracketed together now in "The Man Who Fell out of Bed"; to Dr Donald Macrae, whose extraordinary case of visual agnosia, almost comically similar to my own, was only discovered, by accident, two years after I had written my own piece-it is excerpted in a postscript to "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"; and, most especially, to my close friend and colleague, Dr Isabelle Rapin, in New York, who discussed many cases with me; she introduced me to Christina (the "disembodied lady"), and had known Jose, the "autist artist", for many years when he was a child.

I wish to acknowledge the selfless help and generosity of the patients (and, in some cases, the relatives of the patients) whose tales I tell here-who, knowing (as they often did) that they themselves might not be able to be helped directly, yet permitted, even encouraged, me to write of their lives, in the hope that others might learn and understand, and, one day, perhaps be able to cure. As in Awakenings, names and some circ.u.mstantial details have been changed for reasons of personal and professional confidence, but my aim has been to preserve the essential "feeling" of their lives.

Finally, I wish to express my grat.i.tude-more than grat.i.tude- to my own mentor and physician, to whom I dedicate this book.

New York O.W.S.

To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.

William Osler.

The physician is concerned [unlike the naturalist] . . . with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its ident.i.ty in adverse circ.u.mstances.

Ivy McKenzie.

PART ONE.

LOSSES.

Introduction.

Neurology"s favourite word is "deficit", denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of ident.i.ty and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties). For all of these dysfunctions (another favourite term), we have privative words of every sort-Aphonia, Aphemia, Aphasia, Alexia, Apraxia, Agnosia, Amnesia, Ataxia-a word for every specific neural or mental function of which patients, through disease, or injury, or failure to develop, may find themselves partly or wholly deprived.

The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech, aphasia, consistently followed damage to a particular portion of the left hemisphere of the brain. This opened the way to a cerebral neurology, which made it possible, over the decades, to "map" the human brain, ascribing specific powers-linguistic, intellectual, perceptual, etc.-to equally specific "centres" in the brain. Toward the end of the century it became evident to more acute observers-above all to Freud, in his book Aphasia-that this sort of mapping was too simple, that all mental performances had an intricate internal structure, and must have an equally complex physiological basis. Freud felt this, especially, in regard to certain disorders of recognition and perception, for which he coined the term "agnosia". All adequate understanding of aphasia or agnosia would, he believed, require a new, more sophisticated science.

The new science of brain/mind which Freud envisaged came into being in the Second World War, in Russia, as the joint creation of A. R. Luria (and his father, R. A. Luria), Leontev, Anokhin, Bernstein and others, and was called by them "neuropsychology." The development of this immensely fruitful science was the lifework of A. R. Luria, and considering its revolutionary importance it was somewhat slow in reaching the West. It was set out, systematically, in a monumental book, Higher Cortical Functions in Man (Eng. tr. 1966) and, in a wholly different way, in a biography or "pathography"-The Man with a Shattered World (Eng. tr. 1972). Although these books were almost perfect in their way, there was a whole realm which Luria had not touched. Higher Cortical Functions in Man treated only those functions which appertained to the left hemisphere of the brain; similarly, Zazetsky, subject of The Man with a Shattered World, had a huge lesion in the left hemisphere-the right was intact. Indeed, the entire history of neurology and neuropsychology can be seen as a history of the investigation of the left hemisphere.

One important reason for the neglect of the right, or "minor", hemisphere, as it has always been called, is that while it is easy to demonstrate the effects of variously located lesions on the left side, the corresponding syndromes of the right hemisphere are much less distinct. It was presumed, usually contemptuously, to be more "primitive" than the left, the latter being seen as the unique flower of human evolution. And in a sense this is correct: the left hemisphere is more sophisticated and specialised, a very late outgrowth of the primate, and especially the hominid, brain. On the other hand, it is the right hemisphere which controls the crucial powers of recognising reality which every living creature must have in order to survive. The left hemisphere, like a computer tacked onto the basic creatural brain, is designed for programs and schematics; and cla.s.sical neurology was more concerned with schematics than with reality, so that when, at last, some of the right-hemisphere syndromes emerged, they were considered bizarre.

There had been attempts in the past-for example, by Anton in the 1890s and Potzl in 1928-to explore right-hemisphere syndromes, but these attempts themselves had been bizarrely ignored.

In The Working Brain, one of his last books, Luria devoted a short but tantalising section to right-hemisphere syndromes, ending: These still completely unstudied defects lead us to one of the most fundamental problems-to the role of the right hemisphere in direct consciousness. . . . The study of this highly important field has been so far neglected. ... It will receive a detailed a.n.a.lysis in a special series of papers ... in preparation for publication.

Luria did, finally, write some of these papers, in the last months of his life, when mortally ill. He never saw their publication, nor were they published in Russia. He sent them to R. L. Gregory in England, and they will appear in Gregory"s forthcoming Oxford Companion to the Mind.

Inner difficulties and outer difficulties match each other here. It is not only difficult, it is impossible, for patients with certain right-hemisphere syndromes to know their own problems-a peculiar and specific "anosagnosia", as Babinski called it. And it is singularly difficult, for even the most sensitive observer, to picture the inner state, the "situation", of such patients, for this is almost unimaginably remote from anything he himself has ever known. Left-hemisphere syndromes, by contrast, are relatively easily imagined. Although right-hemisphere syndromes are as common as left-hemisphere syndromes-why should they not be?-we will find a thousand descriptions of left-hemisphere syndromes in the neurological and neuropsychological literature for every description of a right-hemisphere syndrome. It is as if such syndromes were somehow alien to the whole temper of neurology. And yet, as Luria says, they are of the most fundamental importance. So much so that they may demand a new sort of neurology, a "per-sonalistic", or (as Luria liked to call it) a "romantic", science; for the physical foundations of the persona, the self, are here revealed for our study. Luria thought a science of this kind would be best introduced by a story-a detailed case-history of a man with a profound right-hemisphere disturbance, a case-history which would at once be the complement and opposite of "the man with a shattered world." In one of his last letters to me he wrote: "Publish such histories, even if they are just sketches. It is a realm of great wonder." I must confess to being especially intrigued by these disorders, for they open realms, or promise realms, scarcely imagined before, pointing to an open and more s.p.a.cious neurology and psychology, excitingly different from the rather rigid and mechanical neurology of the past.

It is, then, less deficits, in the traditional sense, which have engaged my interest than neurological disorders affecting the self. Such disorders may be of many kinds-and may arise from excesses, no less than impairments, of function-and it seems reasonable to consider these two categories separately. But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess- that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its ident.i.ty, however strange the means may be: and to study or influence these means, no less than the primary insult to the nervous system, is an essential part of our role as physicians. This was powerfully stated by Ivy McKenzie: For what is it that const.i.tutes a "disease ent.i.ty" or a "new disease"? The physician is concerned not, like the naturalist, with a wide range of different organisms theoretically adapted in an average way to an average environment, but with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its ident.i.ty in adverse circ.u.mstances.

This dynamic, this "striving to preserve ident.i.ty", however strange the means or effects of such striving, was recognised in psychiatry long ago-and, like so much else, is especially a.s.sociated with the work of Freud. Thus, the delusions of paranoia were seen by him not as primary but as attempts (however misguided) at rest.i.tution, at reconstructing a world reduced by complete chaos. In precisely the same way, Ivy McKenzie wrote: The pathological physiology of the Parkinsonian syndrome is the study of an organised chaos, a chaos induced in the first instance by destruction of important integrations, and reorganised on an unstable basis in the process of rehabilitation.

As Awakenings was the study of "an organised chaos" produced by a single if multiform disease, so what now follows is a series of similar studies of the organised chaoses produced by a great variety of diseases.

In this first section, "Losses", the most important case, to my mind, is that of a special form of visual agnosia: "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat". I believe it to be of fundamental importance. Such cases const.i.tute a radical challenge to one of the most entrenched axioms or a.s.sumptions of cla.s.sical neurology-in particular, the notion that brain damage, any brain damage, reduces or removes the "abstract and categorical att.i.tude" (in Kurt Goldstein"s term), reducing the individual to the emotional and concrete. (A very similar thesis was made by Hughlings Jackson in the 1860s.) Here, in the case of Dr P., we see the very opposite of this-a man who has (albeit only in the sphere of the visual) wholly lost the emotional, the concrete, the personal, the "real" . . . and been reduced, as it were, to the abstract and the categorical, with consequences of a particularly preposterous kind. What would Hughlings Jackson and Goldstein have said of this? I have often in imagination, asked them to examine Dr P., and then said, "Gentlemen! What do you say now?"

1.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Dr P. was a musician of distinction, well-known for many years as a singer, and then, at the local School of Music, as a teacher. It was here, in relation to his students, that certain strange problems were first observed. Sometimes a student would present himself, and Dr P. would not recognise him; or, specifically, would not recognise his face. The moment the student spoke, he would be recognised by his voice. Such incidents multiplied, causing embarra.s.sment, perplexity, fear-and, sometimes, comedy. For not only did Dr P. increasingly fail to see faces, but he saw faces when there were no faces to see: genially, Magoo-like, when in the street he might pat the heads of water hydrants and parking meters, taking these to be the heads of children; he would amiably address carved k.n.o.bs on the furniture and be astounded when they did not reply. At first these odd mistakes were laughed off as jokes, not least by Dr P. himself. Had he not always had a quirky sense of humour and been given to Zen-like paradoxes and jests? His musical powers were as dazzling as ever; he did not feel ill-he had never felt better; and the mistakes were so ludicrous-and so ingenious-that they could hardly be serious or betoken anything serious. The notion of there being "something the matter" did not emerge until some three years later, when diabetes developed. Well aware that diabetes could affect his eyes, Dr P. consulted an ophthalmologist, who took a careful history and examined his eyes closely. "There"s nothing the matter with your eyes," the doctor concluded. "But there is trouble with the visual parts of your brain.

You don"t need my help, you must see a neurologist." And so, as a result of this referral, Dr P. came to me.

It was obvious within a few seconds of meeting him that there was no trace of dementia in the ordinary sense. He was a man of great cultivation and charm who talked well and fluently, with imagination and humour. I couldn"t think why he had been referred to our clinic.

And yet there was something a bit odd. He faced me as he spoke, was oriented towards me, and yet there was something the matter-it was difficult to formulate. He faced me with his ears, I came to think, but not with his eyes. These, instead of looking, gazing, at me, "taking me in", in the normal way, made sudden strange fixations-on my nose, on my right ear, down to my chin, up to my right eye-as if noting (even studying) these individual features, but not seeing my whole face, its changing expressions, "me", as a whole. I am not sure that I fully realised this at the time-there was just a teasing strangeness, some failure in the normal interplay of gaze and expression. He saw me, he scanned me, and yet . . .

"What seems to be the matter?" I asked him at length.

"Nothing that I know of," he replied with a smile, "but people seem to think there"s something wrong with my eyes."

"But you don"t recognise any visual problems?"

"No, not directly, but I occasionally make mistakes."

I left the room briefly to talk to his wife. When I came back, Dr P. was sitting placidly by the window, attentive, listening rather than looking out. "Traffic," he said, "street sounds, distant trains- they make a sort of symphony, do they not? You know Honegger"s Pacific 234?"

What a lovely man, I thought to myself. How can there be anything seriously the matter? Would he permit me to examine him?

"Yes, of course, Dr Sacks."

I stilled my disquiet, his perhaps, too, in the soothing routine of a neurological exam-muscle strength, coordination, reflexes, tone. ... It was while examining his reflexes-a trifle abnormal on the left side-that the first bizarre experience occurred. I had taken off his left shoe and scratched the sole of his foot with a key-a frivolous-seeming but essential test of a reflex-and then, excusing myself to screw my ophthalmoscope together, left him to put on the shoe himself. To my surprise, a minute later, he had not done this.

"Can I help?" I asked.

"Help what? Help whom?"

"Help you put on your shoe."

"Ach," he said, "I had forgotten the shoe," adding, sotto voce, "The shoe? The shoe?" He seemed baffled.

"Your shoe," I repeated. "Perhaps you"d put it on."

He continued to look downwards, though not at the shoe, with an intense but misplaced concentration. Finally his gaze settled on his foot: "That is my shoe, yes?"

Did I mis-hear? Did he mis-see?

"My eyes," he explained, and put a hand to his foot. "This is my shoe, no?"

"No, it is not. That is your foot. There is your shoe."

"Ah! I thought that was my foot."

Was he joking? Was he mad? Was he blind? If this was one of his "strange mistakes", it was the strangest mistake I had ever come across.

I helped him on with his shoe (his foot), to avoid further complication. Dr P. himself seemed untroubled, indifferent, maybe amused. I resumed my examination. His visual acuity was good: he had no difficulty seeing a pin on the floor, though sometimes he missed it if it was placed to his left.

He saw all right, but what did he see? I opened out a copy of the National Geographic Magazine and asked him to describe some pictures in it.

His responses here were very curious. His eyes would dart from one thing to another, picking up tiny features, individual features, as they had done with my face. A striking brightness, a colour, a shape would arrest his attention and elicit comment-but in no case did he get the scene-as-a-whole. He failed to see the whole, seeing only details, which he spotted like blips on a radar screen. He never entered into relation with the picture as a whole-never faced, so to speak, its physiognomy. He had no sense whatever of a landscape or scene.

I showed him the cover, an unbroken expanse of Sahara dunes.

"What do you see here?" I asked.

"I see a river," he said. "And a little guest-house with its terrace on the water. People are dining out on the terrace. I see coloured parasols here and there." He was looking, if it was "looking", right off the cover into mid-air and confabulating nonexistent features, as if the absence of features in the actual picture had driven him to imagine the river and the terrace and the coloured parasols.

I must have looked aghast, but he seemed to think he had done rather well. There was a hint of a smile on his face. He also appeared to have decided that the examination was over and started to look around for his hat. He reached out his hand and took hold of his wife"s head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat! His wife looked as if she was used to such things.

I could make no sense of what had occurred in terms of conventional neurology (or neuropsychology). In some ways he seemed perfectly preserved, and in others absolutely, incomprehensibly devastated. How could he, on the one hand, mistake his wife for a hat and, on the other, function, as apparently he still did, as a teacher at the Music School?

I had to think, to see him again-and to see him in his own familiar habitat, at home.

A few days later I called on Dr P. and his wife at home, with the score of the Dichterliebe in my briefcase (I knew he liked Schumann), and a variety of odd objects for the testing of perception. Mrs P. showed me into a lofty apartment, which recalled fin-de-siecle Berlin. A magnificent old Bosendorfer stood in state in the centre of the room, and all around it were music stands, instruments, scores. . . . There were books, there were paintings, but the music was central. Dr P. came in, a little bowed, and, distracted, advanced with outstretched hand to the grandfather clock, but, hearing my voice, corrected himself, and shook hands with me. We exchanged greetings and chatted a little of current concerts and performances. Diffidently, I asked him if he would sing.

The Dichterliebe!" he exclaimed. "But I can no longer read music. You will play them, yes?"

I said I would try. On that wonderful old piano even my playing sounded right, and Dr P. was an aged but infinitely mellow Fischer-Dieskau, combining a perfect ear and voice with the most incisive musical intelligence. It was clear that the Music School was not keeping him on out of charity.

Dr P. "s temporal lobes were obviously intact: he had a wonderful musical cortex. What, I wondered, was going on in his parietal and occipital lobes, especially in those areas where visual processing occurred? I carry the Platonic solids in my neurological kit and decided to start with these.

"What is this?" I asked, drawing out the first one.

"A cube, of course."

"Now this?" I asked, brandishing another.

He asked if he might examine it, which he did swiftly and systematically: "A dodecahedron, of course. And don"t bother with the others-I"ll get the icosahedron, too."

Abstract shapes clearly presented no problems. What about faces? I took out a pack of cards. All of these he identified instantly, including the jacks, queens, kings, and the joker. But these, after all, are stylised designs, and it was impossible to tell whether he saw faces or merely patterns. I decided I would show him a volume of cartoons which I had in my briefcase. Here, again, for the most part, he did well. Churchill"s cigar, Schnozzle"s nose: as soon as he had picked out a key feature he could identify the face. But cartoons, again, are formal and schematic. It remained to be seen how he would do with real faces, realistically represented.

I turned on the television, keeping the sound off, and found an early Bette Davis film. A love scene was in progress. Dr P. failed to identify the actress-but this could have been because she had never entered his world. What was more striking was that he failed to identify the expressions on her face or her partner"s, though in the course of a single torrid scene these pa.s.sed from sultry yearning through pa.s.sion, surprise, disgust, and fury to a melting reconcil- iation. Dr P. could make nothing of any of this. He was very unclear as to what was going on, or who was who or even what s.e.x they were. His comments on the scene were positively Martian.

It was just possible that some of his difficulties were a.s.sociated with the unreality of a celluloid, Hollywood world; and it occurred to me that he might be more successful in identifying faces from his own life. On the walls of the apartment there were photographs of his family, his colleagues, his pupils, himself. I gathered a pile of these together and, with some misgivings, presented them to him. What had been funny, or farcical, in relation to the movie, was tragic in relation to real life. By and large, he recognised n.o.body: neither his family, nor his colleagues, nor his pupils, nor himself. He recognised a portrait of Einstein because he picked up the characteristic hair and moustache; and the same thing happened with one or two other people. "Ach, Paul!" he said, when shown a portrait of his brother. "That square jaw, those big teeth- I would know Paul anywhere!" But was it Paul he recognised, or one or two of his features, on the basis of which he could make a reasonable guess as to the subject"s ident.i.ty? In the absence of obvious "markers", he was utterly lost. But it was not merely the cognition, the gnosis, at fault; there was something radically wrong with the whole way he proceeded. For he approached these faces- even of those near and dear-as if they were abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them, he did not behold. No face was familiar to him, seen as a "thou", being just identified as a set of features, an "it". Thus, there was formal, but no trace of personal, gnosis. And with this went his indifference, or blindness, to expression. A face, to us, is a person looking out-we see, as it were, the person through his persona, his face. But for Dr P. there was no persona in this sense-no outward persona, and no person within.

I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my b.u.t.tonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him. He took it like a botanist or morphol-ogist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower.

About six inches in length," he commented. "A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment."

"Yes," I said encouragingly, "and what do you think it is, Dr P.?"

"Not easy to say." He seemed perplexed. "It lacks the simple symmetry of the Platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own. ... I think this could be an inflorescence or flower."

"Could be?" I queried.

"Could be," he confirmed.

"Smell it," I suggested, and he again looked somewhat puzzled, as if I had asked him to smell a higher symmetry. But he complied courteously, and took it to his nose. Now, suddenly, he came to life.

"Beautiful!" he exclaimed. "An early rose. What a heavenly smell!" He started to hum "Die Rose, die Lillie . . ." Reality, it seemed, might be conveyed by smell, not by sight.

I tried one final test. It was still a cold day, in early spring, and I had thrown my coat and gloves on the sofa.

"What is this?" I asked, holding up a glove.

"May I examine it?" he asked, and, taking it from me, he proceeded to examine it as he had examined the geometrical shapes.