Tuesday 22 November 2005

A Profound Sickness

Most mornings I like to peruse the pages of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which, like many a German newspaper, is refreshingly tedious, being that it is comparatively free of the entertainingly idiotic opinions that infect all British newspapers. This morning, however, I was startled from my near-slumber, not by some indelicate pronouncement or brainless theorem, but rather by the following sober report by Alexander Kissler:
Ein gesunder Mann sucht einen Arzt, der ihm das Rückenmark durchtrennt, . . . [um] ‘[seine] innere Identität als Mensch mit einer Querschnittlähmung zu realisieren und somit psychische Heilung zu erlangen.’
(A healthy man seeks a doctor who will cut through his spinal cord . . . [in order] ‘to realise [his] inner identity as a human with paraplegia and thus to achieve mental healing.’)
(Alexander Kissler, “Mein Haus, mein Auto, meine Schwerstbehinderung”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22nd November 2005.)
The age-old maternal threat of “I’ll give you something to complain about in a minute” presumably held no sway over this man.

2 comments:

Nadeem Mohsin said...

Sometimes I wonder if giving these chaps exactly what they want wouldn't be a good idea.

Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Mental healing? A lobotomy would accomplish the same thing, and he'd still be able to walk, to boot!

Jeffery Hodges

* * *