A Leg To Stand One by Oliver Sacks

Author:Oliver Sacks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Inf.
Publisher: [Côte d’Azur]
Published: 1983-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

—Arnold

Flesh which was still as unliving as marble but, like the marble flesh of Galatea, might come to life. And even the new plaster partook of this feeling: I had hated the old one, feeling it putrid, obscene, but I immediately took a liking to the new one which Mr. Enoch was now carefully applying, laying layer upon layer round my new pink leg. This cast I thought elegant, shapely, even smart. More important, I thought of it as a sort of good chrysalis, which would sheathe the leg and let it develop completely, until it was ready to hatch, to be reborn.

As I was wheeled back from the Casting Room, and up in the elevator, we paused by the broad windows, which were open now to the air. The sky had been dark and charged before; but now the storm had broken, and it was heavenly calm and clear. I left the very elements themselves had had their crisis at precisely the same time as I had had mine. All was resolved now, the heavens clear and blue. A lovely breeze came through the great windows, and I felt intoxicated as the sun and wind played on my skin. It was my first sense of the outside world in more than two weeks, two weeks in which I had moldered, in despair, in my cell. And there was music, a new radio, when I returned to my room – wonderful Purcell, Dido and Aeneas – and this too, like the wind and the sun and the light, came like a heavenly refreshment to my senses. I felt bathed in the music, penetrated by it, healed and quickened through and through: divine music, spirit, message and messenger of life!

Relieved of all my anxieties and tensions, sure and confident that the leg would come back, and that I would recover and walk again – though when, and how, God only knew – I suddenly fell into a deep blissful sleep: sleeping in trust, cradled in God’s arms. A deep, deep, and in itself healing, sleep – my first proper rest since the day of the accident – my first sleep uninterrupted by hideous nightmares and phantoms. The sleep of innocence, of forgiveness, of faith and hope renewed.

When I awoke I had an odd impulse to flex my left leg, and in that self-same moment immediately did so! Here was a movement previously impossible, one which involved active contraction of the whole quad – a movement hitherto impossible and unthinkable. And yet, in a trice, I had thought it, and done it. There was no cogitation, no preparation, no deliberation, whatever; there was no ‘trying’; I had the impulse, flash-like – and flash-like I acted. The idea, the impulse, the action, were all one – I could not say which came first, they all came together. I suddenly ‘recollected’ how to move the leg, and in the instant of recollection I actually did it. The knowing-what-to-do had no theoretical quality whatever – it was entirely practical, immediate – and compelling.

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