An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

Sacks receives a phone call in October 1991 from a man informing him of the story of a 50-year-old man named Virgil who has been virtually blind since childhood, but who may have an opportunity to regain his eyesight. Virgil has thick cataracts in addition to retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition that slowly eats away at the retinas. However, his fiancée Amy and her ophthalmologist are unsure if he truly has retinitis pigmentosa, because he can still see some light, darkness, and shapes. They encourage Virgil to consider a cataract removal surgery to see if he might have some vision remaining, and Virgil agrees to have his right cataract removed first.

According to Sacks, a neurologist’s career is full of “novel and unexpected situations, which can become windows, peepholes, into the intricacy of nature—an intricacy that one might not anticipate from the ordinary course of life” (103). He is curious about what vision might mean for Virgil, and he views this as an opportunity to see if one needs experience in order to see and process the world—something that has been the subject of philosophical and psychological debate for centuries.

Virgil had poor eyesight even as an infant, and suffered from meningitis, cat-scratch fever, and polio when he was only three years old. After two weeks in a coma, he emerged with severely damaged retinas. When he was six, he developed cataracts in both eyes, which worsened his vision even more. He was sent to a school for the blind to learn Braille. As an adult, he trained as a massage therapist and moved to Oklahoma, where he made a modest but steady life for himself. However, Amy sees Virgil as stagnant, and she hopes that restoring his sight might help him put himself out in the world with more confidence.

After Virgil’s first surgery, Amy’s diary notes that he can in fact see, which she describes as a miracle. However, Sacks learns from speaking with Virgil that he couldn’t recognize anything post-surgery until he heard his surgeon speak: “[T]his chaos of light and shadow was a face—and indeed, the face of his surgeon” (107). Unlike patients who develop cataracts later on in life, Virgil has no visual experience of the world around him—no understanding of how light, shadow, color, and motion work together. Consequently, his brain can’t compute what he is seeing. Post-surgery, he can see colors and movements but can’t identify what they are. Furthermore, parts of Virgil’s retinas have deteriorated over the years, which makes it difficult for him to focus his eyes. Amy hopes his eyesight will improve more when they operate upon his left eye.

When Sacks and his colleague Robert Wasserman fly out to Oklahoma, newlyweds Virgil and Amy meet them at the airport. Virgil does not appear to be in good health, and he cannot make eye contact or look at facial expressions: “Virgil’s behavior was certainly not that of a sighted man, but was not that of a blind man, either. It was, rather, the behavior of one mentally blind, or agnosic” (110). As they drive away, Virgil is intrigued by moving cars and buses, and he can identify traffic lights changing. However, he struggles to read whole words, and his first trip to a grocery store resulted in a visual onslaught that terrified him. When they arrive at his house, Virgil walks up to the front door unassisted and unlocks the door—a task he has been practicing since his surgery. Still, Virgil struggles with stairs and is confused by his own shadow. He has lost the confidence he felt moving as a blind man, and he ironically feels more disabled than ever.

Wasserman and Sacks conduct tests on Virgil and observe him in his home. They ask Virgil to watch a baseball game on TV, which he used to listen to on the radio. He can follow the game with the sound on, but when the TV is muted, he is lost. Although Virgil does enjoy seeing color, he is unable to match colors and often calls them by the wrong names, which Sacks calls color anomia or agnosia. He slowly memorizes shapes, but he struggles to understand solid objects. Amy has had to reintroduce him to his house and the items in it, and he himself “ha[s] established a canonical line—a particular line up the path, through the sitting room to the kitchen, with further lines, as necessary, to the bathroom and the bedroom” (120). From there, he has slowly learned how his home is visually constructed.

Sacks compares Virgil’s experience to that of a newborn baby who has not yet learned “perceptual constancy”: the correlation of the various appearances of certain objects. This is an enormous task for an infant, and Virgil, who has forgotten most visual cues, struggles to learn and remember them now.

The doctors, Amy, and Virgil go on an excursion to a zoo, where Virgil can identify an animal’s features but cannot describe the animal as a whole. When they go to lunch, Virgil grows increasingly visually exhausted and has difficulty eating.

Virgil begins buying miniature toys as a way to study real-world animals, humans, and objects, learning through his ability to play. Still, Amy reports that Virgil “relapses” when he’s tired or confused, going about everyday routines the way he used to as a blind person. Sacks says that this is to be expected, yet he and Wasserman are baffled when Virgil begins to have inexplicably blurry vision for several days at a time. Sacks theorizes that Virgil’s cerebral cortex, the part of the brain in charge of processing visual information, is overwhelmed and shutting down to prevent neural overload. Virgil also tends to act blind when around family members who were accustomed to his blindness. His inability to adapt to his newfound sight and his efforts to give up his use of touch cause him psychological discomfort and eventually deep depression.

Sacks points out that babies undergo a nearly perpetual process of visual learning that’s quite different from what newly sighted adults experience. Many doctors have noted newly sighted patients claiming that they needed to “kill” their blind self in order to be a “seeing” person, implying a radical change of self and identity that goes along with gaining vision later in life.

After Virgil’s left cataract is removed, he returns to his work as a massage therapist but is disturbed by seeing his client’s actual bodies, which appear different from his tactile memories. He begins to close his eyes during massages to regain his confidence. As he tries to adjust to seeing life, he finds himself deeply conflicted, unsure if he wants to change careers and if he might ever be comfortable driving or doing other normal “sighted” things.

Virgil’s family responds positively when they see him at Christmas, noting that he seems more alert. Sacks hopes that their acceptance of Virgil as a seeing person will give him a much-needed morale boost. However, Sacks receives a call later that winter that Virgil has experienced a bout of lobar pneumonia as well as a collapsed lung in the local intensive care unit. Despite beating the pneumonia, Virgil now faces respiratory failure. This is complicated by Virgil’s other health issues, as well as Pickwickian syndrome—a depression in the respiratory center of the brain that obstructs breathing. Virgil also claims he cannot see, though Amy says he is still acting like a sighted person. When he is finally released from the hospital, Virgil must leave his job due to his constant need for an oxygen cylinder. This causes him to lose his home as well.

Amy maintains that Virgil lost his sight but has since gained it back, yet Virgil’s doctors at his rehabilitation center tell Sacks that the only sight he has left is color perception. Confused by this development, Sacks and Wasserman fly the couple to New York City for further testing. When Amy and Virgil arrive, Sacks can see just how much the latter’s health has deteriorated. Shockingly, testing reveals that his vision is worse than it was before the cataract surgeries; he can see a shape or object every once in a while but quickly forgets it. Remembering how Virgil complained about the sun’s glare after his surgeries, Sacks and Wasserman theorize that perhaps he burned out what remained of his retinas.

Like the doctors who documented similar cases in the past, Sacks is fascinated by Virgil’s story, yet he notes the twist of terrible irony at the end. Despite his usual calm demeanor, Virgil becomes prone to fits of rage after he survives pneumonia. Sacks says that Virgil was stuck between two worlds and that his ultimate loss of vision was in some sense a gift.

exhibit on memory. Magnani’s work features in the exhibit: specifically, 50 paintings and drawings of his childhood home in Pontito, Italy. Although he was born there, he has not been back in 30 years. The juxtaposition of Magnani’s scenic paintings alongside photographs of the same views in contemporary Pontito prove his remarkable memory and attention to detail, which has earned him the nickname “The Memory Artist.”

Sacks wonders if Magnani is an eidetic artist—someone who can hold a scene or memory in their head for days, months, or years and then reproduce it accurately. Magnani invites Sacks to his home, where they tour his many paintings of Pontito while Magnani reminisces. He seems unable to help himself and tells Sacks the only way his brain quiets down is by painting what he remembers.

Magnani was born in Pontito in 1934, when the village held approximately 500 residents. Nestled in the Tuscan Hills, the remote village had ancient origins and changed little throughout history until the beginning of World War II. In 1942, Magnani’s father died, and the Nazis invaded, kicking out the townspeople. When the residents returned after the war, many of their homes were defaced or destroyed; they struggled to return to normal life, and the population of the town decreased to 70 people. Pontito left the town in 1946 to attend school in Lucca, Italy (his paintings, however, are all set prior to 1943). After training as a woodworker, Magnani tried to return to Pontito, but there was no work available for him. After living and working on cruise ships, in 1965 he decided to settle in San Francisco. He claims he never thought about Pontito during his many travels.

Magnani eventually developed a mysterious neurological condition that he never received a diagnosis for. While staying in the hospital, he had vivid dreams of Pontito. He felt something was calling to him and telling him to paint and draw what he remembered of his village, despite his having no real artistic training: “[H]e was also frightened by the power he now felt—a power that had seized him and taken him over but that he could perhaps control and give voice to” (152). Magnani’s acquaintances, including his brother-in-law, confirm that he did not have this impulse to talk about and paint Pontito nonstop before his mystery illness.

Over time, Magnani’s visions of the village intensified, and he even began seeing them in daylight. He not only sees the place, but hears sounds like church bells and smells the nearby nut and olive groves. Sacks is reminded of psychic seizures, recognized by John Hughes Gastaut in the early 20th century, in which the patient has “commanding hallucinations” and an overwhelming sense of nostalgia (154). In the mid-20th century, neurologist Henri Gastaut wrote a book claiming van Gogh likely had psychic seizures (now called interdictal personality syndrome, Waxman-Geschwind syndrome, or Dostoevsky syndrome), and in 1961, neurologist Norman Geschwind noted that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy often showed productivity—sometimes creative ambition. This may reflect the strong connection in the brain between sensation, emotion, and memory, which allows the patient to feel “transported” into another consciousness while accessing a memory.

Magnani struggles with this doubling of consciousness; despite living in San Francisco in the 1990s, he feels that he is more often somewhere in Pontito pre-1943. Sacks says, “The cost of Franco’s nostalgia and art, then, has been his reduction to a sort of half existence in the present” (157). This intensity only grows with time. Sacks theorizes that, in addition to temporal lobe epilepsy, Magnani may need an outlet for deep, complex emotions he internalized regarding his childhood home and family; Magnani was particularly close to his mother, and her death in 1972 devastated him so much that he temporarily stopped painting.

Despite his desire to go back to his hometown, Magnani manages to self-sabotage before any trip, perhaps fearing Pontito would not be the way he remembered. Sacks sees this paradox as the heart of nostalgia, which longs for the past, but a past that has been turned into a fantasy. Sacks visits Pontito for himself in 1989, hoping to see the sights in person and speak to some of Magnani’s remaining relatives. While many of the paintings prove strikingly accurate, others are misleading, allowing the village to feel bigger than it truly is. Strong memories are typical of temporal lobe experiential seizures and indicative of the complicated nature of memory. No matter how concrete Magnani’s memories may be, they are always, in some regards, a reconstruction.

Sacks posits that painting this village attempts a “transfiguring vision of childhood with the place, Pontito, taking the place of the people—the parents, the living people—who must have been so important to the child” (166). This may also explain why there are rarely any people in Magnani’s paintings. Rather than characterize the paintings as fantasy, Sacks sees them as an “intensification” of memory (167). In addition, Magnani’s mission is a cultural one to preserve his beloved village from the cruel passage of time.

When Magnani first met Sacks, he said that returning to Pontito might be the end of his memories and art. However, when Sacks speaks about Magnani at a conference in Italy, Magnani begins to receive invitations to show his work there, and he decides to finally return. He finds that the town both is and is not like his memories. He misses the sounds of animals and humans from his past, but he is embraced by the locals, who view him as a prodigal son. When Magnani returns to San Francisco, he experiences an existential crisis in which his memories of Pontito from childhood and the present day begin to collide. Eventually this dies down, yet Magnani claims to have lost the fantasy of the place and stops drawing or painting for a month.

In 1991, Magnani and Sacks return to Florence for an exhibit of Magnani’s work. He wishes to visit Pontito again, but this time to return and work alone within the village. They visit Magnani’s sister, who has retired to the village. Magnani tells Sacks he is sketch the town for a few weeks and refamiliarize himself with it. When he returns to San Francisco, he feels reinvigorated to return to his artwork. Although the paintings are not dramatically different, he is still disturbed by just how much Pontito has, in his eyes, changed. He no longer wishes to return, fearing that it would further compromise his memory and fantasy, but he plans to keep working and to keep the promise he made to his mother to paint Pontito.