The Man With a Shattered World
"This book is about a person who fought with the tenacity of the damned to recover the use of his shattered brain." - Alexander Luria
What I've Learned
The Man With a Shattered World, written by Alexander Luria, a famous Soviet neuropsychologist, details the account of one of his patients named Zasetsky. Zasetsky was a good man, one of four siblings in the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century. His father passed away when he was two, leaving his mother to care for the family. She was illiterate, but a hard worker who always managed to keep them fed, clothed, and sheltered. Zasetsky, who had a knack for academics from an early age, had a goal to graduate from college, get a job in a scientific field, and help ease the burden that was forced upon his mother. In 1941, he was close to college graduation, but then the Germans attacked. Zasetsky was one of many men whose lives were derailed by having to join the military.
In 1943, during an attack on a German position, Zasetsky suffered a bullet wound to the brain. He was taken to a Russian aid-station where he survived, but the world was completely different for him. A portion of his brain was completely destroyed. He had amnestic aphasia, meaning that he could not remember certain words. He also had a more general retrograde amnesia where whole parts of his life were lost. On top of this, he suffered from hemianopsia, a condition where a person can only see one side of their visual field. In this case, he could only see out of his left visual field. Luria wrote, “The bullet fragment that entered his brain had so devastated his world that he no longer had any sense of space, could not judge relationships between things, and perceived the world as broken into thousands of separate parts. As he put it, space ‘made no sense’, he feared it, for it lacked stability.”
Zasetsky looked normal from the outside, but he clearly behaved in an abnormal fashion. He would run into walls and stumble about due to his visual defect. He could not read, so using signs to navigate and travel made things difficult. Although his family was relieved to have him home, he could not help with basic chores or errands. As evidenced by his academic and military standings, Zasetsky was a highly conscientious man, so his apparent uselessness grated on his spirits.
After learning to write and somewhat read, he decided to keep a journal of his experience which would eventually receive the title “I’ll Fight On”. Journaling was excruciating for him. Normal adults who can read and write have automatized this process to the point where we are unaware of the fact that it even is a process. We read words at a glance and text our friends effortlessly. For Zasetsky, his reading and writing skills were equivalent developmentally to that of a child first learning. To try and capture an idea in words, he would have to search for a letter in his mind, then another letter to create a syllable, then match that syllable with a second while maintaining memory of the first. This process was painstakingly effortful and could take many minutes just to get out a single word.
At a pace of about half a page a day, Zasetsky ended up writing three thousand pages over the course of 25 years, none of which he could read.
He could not do anything else in life due to his condition. Writing this journal was something he could do, and it gave him a reason to live. He also thought it could be useful for others, not just interested scientists, but also the layperson. He thought that if he could paint the picture of what happens when a person suffers a brain injury, that others would develop more appreciation for what they have.
Zasetsky wrote, “This writing is my only way of thinking. If I shut these notebooks, give it up, I’ll be right back in the desert, in that ‘know-nothing’ world of emptiness and amnesia.”
Why It Matters
“This book is about a person who fought with the tenacity of the damned to recover the use of his shattered brain,” Luria commented on his patient. Zasetsky had a special character to be plagued by those pathologies and to choose to fight on. I reflect on my own experiences where I have given up for much less. It makes me ponder about the extent of human nature. How good can we really be if we only decided to aim for it? There was clearly something innate in Zasetsky that drove him despite the tragedy, but is his character something that we can, and perhaps must, imitate? What would our world be like if we took it upon ourselves to find something meaningful and good to do given our capabilities and limitations?
We take so much for granted, our limbs, our eyes, our memories. Zasetsky knew this all too well as he lived in constant comparison of who he was prior to the wound: “I always feel as if I’m living out a dream – hideous, fiendish nightmare – that I’m not a man but a shadow, some creature that’s fit for nothing…” One could make the argument that there are things worse than death, and perhaps Zasetsky's mental prison is an example of suffering so deep that death would be a relief. And yet, he chose life. Not just life, but life with a purpose directed towards the aid of other people. While he had every excuse to become cynical about the randomness of life, he still demonstrated concern for others, for those who did not have a chance at life due to the devastation of war.
I'm reminded of a quote from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, cited by Oliver Sacks in Awakenings:
“Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time… compels us to descend to our ultimate depths… I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know it makes us more profound… In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin… with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.”
Be grateful. Be better.
References
Luria, A. R. (1972). The Man With a Shattered World. Basic Books.
Sacks, O. (1973). Awakenings. Duckworth & Co.