He ended up in a lovely, quiet place, a refuge amid the storms of war, a hospital where hundreds of soldiers with similar injuries had been sent. He remembered this place well and described it with enviable clarity.
There’s a magnificent view everywhere; on one side, an enormous lake surrounded by evergreens; then an even bigger lake, and a third. Wherever you look the trees are gigantic, and the sky overhead seems bluer, even though the sun is very bright, simply blazing with light.
He also had a vivid recollection of the last moments of his trip before he arrived:
The jolting of the station wagon irritates me, I can feel it in my head where I was wounded. For some reason the station wagon seems to have been circling around in one place for some time now. . . . But here’s another lake, and over there a big, three-story building close to some others—all of them set right here in the woods. The engine’s stopping—we’re here.
By the time he reached the rehabilitation hospital the bandages had been removed from his head. On the surface his wound appeared to have healed.
I still have to read syllable by syllable like a child; I am just as plagued by amnesia and can’t remember words or meanings; I am still overcome by “mental aphasia” and can’t recover my memory, any of the skills or knowledge I once had.
Two ideas keep running through my head: I keep telling myself my life is over, that I’m of no use to anyone but will stay this way until I die, which probably won’t be long now. On the other hand, something keeps insisting I have to live, that time can heal everything, that maybe all I need is the right medicine and enough time to recover.
At a later date he recalled his ambivalence and wrote:
Often, when I considered what my life was like, I’d think: Who needs it? Besides, those eternal doubts of mine made things even worse. I still wasn’t willing to believe I’d suffered such a cruel head wound and kept insisting it must be a dream. Time was racing by so quickly, so peculiarly.
I felt as though I were bewitched, lost in some nightmare world, a vicious circle from which there was no way out, no possibility of waking. Nothing I saw made any sense to me. When I thought about that injury, the dreadful effects it had, I’d become terrified: Can all this really have happened? Will it go on this way until my miserable life is over?
Although he was still sensitive to nature, everything he perceived seemed changed and inaccessible.
Ever since I was wounded I’ve had a hard time understanding and identifying things in my environment. What’s more, when I see or imagine things in my mind (physical objects, phenomena, plants, animals, birds, people), I still can’t think of the words for these right away. And vice versa—when I hear a sound or a word I can’t remember right off what it means.
What do these difficulties signify? Why had his world collapsed so that everything appeared changed and difficult to grasp?