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In 1975, Neurologist Oliver Sacks saw a hospitalized patient by the name of Jimmy R. (see “Lost Mariner” in wife-hat-2)
“Jimmie was a fine-looking man, with a curly bush of grey hair, a healthy and handsome forty-nine year-old. He was cheerful, friendly, and warm.
‘Hiya, Doc!’ he said. ‘Nice morning! Do I take this chair here?’ He was a genial soul, very ready to talk and to answer any questions I asked him. He told me his name and birth date, and the name of the little town in Connecticut where he was born…. He spoke of the houses where his family had lived—he remembered their phone numbers still. He spoke of school and school days, the friends he’d had, and his special fondness for mathematics and science. He talked with enthusiasm of his days in the navy—he was seventeen, had just graduated from high school when he was drafted in 1943.
With his good engineering mind he was a ‘natural’ for radio and electronics, and after a crash course in Texas found himself assistant radio operator on a submarine. He remembered the names of various submarines on which he had served, their missions, where they were stationed, the names of his shipmates….
With recalling, reliving, Jimmie was full of animation; he did not seem to be speaking of the past but of the present, and I was very struck by the change of tense in his recollections as he passed from his school days to his days in the navy. He had been using the past tense, but now used the …the actual present tense of immediate experience.
A sudden, improbable suspicion seized me.
‘What year is this?’ 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 ….
‘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 the chair. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered…. What’s happened to me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?’— and he became frantic, panicked.
‘It’s okay, Jimmie,’ I said soothingly. ‘It’s just a mistake. Nothing to worry about. Hey!’ I took him to the window. ‘Isn’t this a lovely spring day. See the kids there playing baseball?’ He regained his color and started to smile, and I stole away, taking the hateful mirror with me.
Two minutes later I re-en...
