En smakebit på søndag er et konsept jeg har lånt av Mari på Flukten fra virkeligheten. Alt du trenger å gjøre er å slå opp i boka du leser nå og velge ut noen setninger du synes passer – uten at de avslører for mye av handlingen – før du legger dem ut på bloggen din og legger igjen ei lenke i innlegget til Mari. På denne måten kan vi klikke oss fra smakebit til smakebit, og kanskje oppdage nye skatter?

Nå leser jeg en sakprosabok av nevrologen Oliver Sacks som har blitt litt av en klassiker siden den kom på 80-tallet. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat – and other clinical tales inneholder en rekke korte fortellinger om pasienter han har møtt, med forskjellige, merkelige nevrologiske problemer. Vaskeseddelen sier som følger:

In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine’s ultimate responsibility: “the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.”

Smakebiten skal dere få fra side 169:

He spent four years in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane – despite doubts as to whether he was either criminal or insane. He seemed to accept his incarceration with a certain relief – the sense of punishment was perhaps welcome, and there was, he doubtless felt, security in isolation. ‘I am not fit for society,’ he would say, mournfully, when questioned.