Beyond the Robot by Gary Lachman

Beyond the Robot by Gary Lachman

Author:Gary Lachman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-08T19:57:24+00:00


CHAPTER TEN

INNER WORLDS AND CRIMINAL HISTORIES

The relationship between our two brains seemed to offer Wilson a clue to many mysteries. He began to think of his right brain as an ally, a hidden friend who, when needed, could come to his aid. He thought of experiences in the past when, with hindsight, this seemed to be the case. Once, in the early 1960s, returning from a visit to Leicester—where he had picked up a bad case of “people poisoning”—Wilson stopped in Cheltenham, where he knew there was a good secondhand bookshop. Joy and Sally were with him and as Joy made room in the car for more books, Wilson took Sally, who was three years old, into the shop. After a few minutes Sally grew bored and asked for Joy. Wilson walked her to the entrance and pointed to Joy, who was at the car, only a few yards away. Sally headed off and Wilson went back into the shop.

Five minutes later Joy appeared and Wilson asked where Sally was. Joy said she thought she was with him. They both panicked and ran out into the street. It was rush hour and the road was full of traffic. They could see no sign of Sally. Joy went one way and Wilson went the other. They were both desperate—Sally had never been out of their sight since she was born and now she had disappeared. Wilson “had to master a rising sense of misery and disaster.”1 Giving way to fear would do no good. He simply had to muster the determination to find his daughter.

He did. When he returned to the shop again after another search, he saw that Joy had found her. Sally had wandered around the block and Joy had seen her. Wilson had “never experienced such relief.” He also noticed something else: everything now seemed beautiful. Earlier he had been exhausted after spending too much time with people in Leicester and had regretted the beer he had drunk at lunch. The long drive to Cornwall was not appealing—the scenery seemed drab and boring. Now “a bus that held us up at a traffic light seemed a delightful object.” Even exhaust smoke struck him as a “pleasant smell.” But his relief, however great, was not the important point, he thought; what was important was the energy he had summoned to meet the crisis. He had refused to give way to despair and, seeing this, his right brain snapped to attention. Now, as he drove through traffic in a gray drizzle, he felt no impatience, as he had earlier; there was “only enormous gratitude that everything should be so interesting.”2

There were other occasions too, when his right brain came to his rescue. Once in Los Angeles, Wilson had agreed to meet Joy, Sally, and Damon at Disneyland, where they had gone while he had given a lecture. But he hadn’t decided on exactly where to meet them and when he arrived at the gates he realized he had forgotten how big Disneyland was.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.