Something had happened unlike anything he had ever experienced before. At first he could not perceive a thing; his world had collapsed into fragments, and these did not form complete objects or images. The right side of whatever he happened to be looking at was nonexistent; all he could make out was an even gray vacuum. Since objects had ceased to resemble complete entities, he had to try to assemble the fragments and guess what they meant:
Ever since I was wounded I haven’t been able to see a single object as a whole—not one thing. Even now I have to fill in a lot about objects, phenomena, or any living thing from imagination. That is, I have to picture them in my mind and try to remember them as full and complete—after I have a chance to look them over, touch them, or get some image of them. I can’t even see a small inkwell as one complete object. True, there are some things I can think of as I remembered them before, but I’ve forgotten what most objects, phenomena, or living things are like, and I see, or picture them to myself, quite differently than I did before I was wounded.
Even now I still don’t see entire objects, things, or people as I did before—only part of them. When I look at a spoon, at the left tip, I’m amazed. I can’t figure out why I only see the tip and not the whole spoon. When this first happened it looked to me like a peculiar bit of space, and sometimes I’d actually get frightened when the spoon got lost in my soup.
At this point in his journal, he drew a sketch showing how his vision had changed—what it was like before and after his injury. (See Figure 2.)
Moreover, the objects he saw no longer appeared stable. They would glimmer fitfully and become displaced, making everything appear as if it were in a state of flux.
Through and beyond the objects I see there are endless numbers—a myriad really—of tiny, shifting swarms of midges that make it hard for me to look at the objects themselves. Because of this swarm, I can’t see the first letter of a word clearly. It doesn’t come through clearly but looks like it’s been plucked, gnawed around the edges, and what’s left are scattered points, quills, or threads that flicker like a swarm. I can see this now with my own eyes—when I look out the window I have a very small span of vision, but in and around that span I see this swarm racing back and forth.
At times this problem was compounded by hallucinations, for the scar tissue that had developed in the damaged area of his brain stimulated the nerve cells that retain visual memories. This created an additional cause for suffering—the anguish of a man who finds not only his world disintegrated but his vision deranged.
I remember there were two days and nights I didn’t dare close my eyes. I seemed to be having hallucinations. I’d no sooner close my eyes than I’d see some ugly thing, something weird—a human face but with enormous ears, it seemed, and eyes that were just as peculiar. Or else I’d see faces, objects, and rooms of different sorts. So I’d open my eyes as fast as I could.
Figure 2
(Top) Vision before the injury. (Bottom) Vision after the injury.
It was difficult for him to live in a world where half the things seemed to have disappeared, so that he had to reorient himself entirely.
Once when I left my room and was walking in the corridor, I’d no sooner taken a few steps than I suddenly banged my right shoulder and the right side of my forehead against the wall and got a huge bump on my forehead. I was furious; I simply couldn’t understand why I’d suddenly bumped into the wall. I should have seen it. Just then I happened to look down—at the floor and at my feet—and I shuddered. I couldn’t see the right side of my body. My hands and feet had disappeared. What could have happened to them?
(Even months and years later these defects had not improved; his vision remained just as fragmented.)
He tried to understand what had happened to him and began to describe each of his defects, experimenting with his badly distorted vision:
Since I was wounded I haven’t been able to see anything out of the right side of either eye. But since my eyes look just as normal as other people’s, no one can tell, simply by looking at me, whether or not I can see. But it means that if I focus on a point with either eye, everything on a vertical line to the right of that point is blocked out. I can see what’s to the left of that but many things are not visible, that is, there are some blank spaces in my vision. When I begin to read a word, even a word like dizziness [Russian: “golovokruzheniye”], and look at the letter “k,” the upper right point, I only see the letters on the left (“v-o”). I can’t see anything on the right of the letter “k” or around it. To the left of it I can see the two letters “v” and “o” but nothing further to the left. If someone were to trace the letters further to the left with a pencil, I’d see where the movement of the pencil began, but not the letters. This means I not only can’t see anything with the right part of either eye, I also can’t see some parts of the objects around me on the left side.