Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Author:Olga Tokarczuk
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

LETTERS TO THE AMPUTATED LEG

The loose pages I received after Verheyen’s death put me in confusion. Throughout the last years of his life my teacher recorded his thoughts in the form of letters to a particular correspondent, a circumstance I’m certain anyone would deem sufficient proof of his madness. However when one carefully reads these hurried notes, which were almost certainly intended as an aidemémoire rather than for someone else’s eyes, one sees in them the record of a kind of journey to an unknown land and an attempt to sketch out its map.

I thought long and hard about what I ought to do with this unexpected inheritance, but I decided against its publication in any form. I, his student and friend, would prefer for him to be remembered as a wonderful anatomist and draftsman, the discoverer of the Achilles heel and several previously unnoticed parts of our body. I would prefer for us to remember his beautiful engravings and accept that it is impossible to understand everything of anyone else’s life. But to address the rumours that have been spreading after his death in Amsterdam and Leiden – that the master had gone mad – I wish to briefly present several excerpts from his papers here and demonstrate in so doing that he was not mad. I have no doubts, meanwhile, that Filip allowed himself to be overwhelmed by a particular obsession connected with his inexplicable pain. Obsession is, in any case, the premonition of the existence of an individual language, an irreproducible language through the attentive use of which we will be able to uncover the truth. We must follow this premonition into regions that to others might seem absurd and mad. I don’t know why this language of truth sounds angelic to some, while to others it changes into mathematical signs or notations. But there are also those to whose whim it speaks in a very strange way.

In the Letters to My Amputated Leg Filip attempted to prove coherently and without emotion that since the body and soul are in essence one and the same, since they are two attributes of an infinite, all-encompassing God, there must be between them some sort of proportionality designed by the Creator. Totam naturam unum esse individuum. This is in essence what interested him the most: in what way do such distinct substances as the body and the soul connect in the human body and act upon one another? In what way can the body, occupying space, establish causal contact with a soul that occupies no space? How and from whence does pain arise?

He wrote for example:

What is it that awakens me, when I feel pain and suffering, since my leg has been separated from me and is floating now in alcohol? There is nothing pinching it, no reason for its suffering, no such pain that can be logically justified and yet it exists. Now I look at it and simultaneously feel in it, in the toes, unbearably hot, as though

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