The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna

Author:Joanna Kavenna [Joanna Kavenna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571258543
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

I sat there in silence for a moment, wondering at the change in this man. You must perceive it, Professor Wilson, even through my flawed account. Indeed to witness it first-hand was most disturbing, so stark did it seem. I had no understanding of how it might have occurred. It was rather as if Professor Semmelweis had been replaced by another man; as if the morning had presented me with an interloper, or perhaps the interloper was before me and the real, more confused and desperate Professor Semmelweis had been vanished through the twisted ministrations of Herr Meyer. Of course his appearance was the same, but the character was so very different, it was hard to understand what had occurred. I had not believed him absolutely lost to reason before, and had rather imagined – as I mentioned – that he was poised between the world we recognise and another psychic realm we generally regard as beyond our concerns, or only of concern in so far as we seek to police and restrain those who occupy this world. Yet now, as he described these unfortunate women, Professor Semmelweis was upset – the man was trembling in his grief and self-blame – and he was not eloquent in the ordinary way, but he might have passed for little more than agitated and eccentric. He would have been heeded at a supper party, though people might have said he ran on a little, lacked a sense of when to pause. And the hand-wringing, perhaps that would have attracted notice. It is true, his gestures were overblown and distracting, but, relative to the state of nerves in which I had previously found him, he was greatly changed. And though his memory was still betraying him constantly, he was picking a way through its blanks, eking out dreams and recollections. His general demeanour made me suspect his condition was one of fits and regressions, and that he might sink into an episode and then later appear relatively recovered, before descending once more. I had not previously seen an inmate who presented so dramatic an oscillation between lucidity and stupor, between his regressions and his advances, but thus I found him.

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