Most people are almost blind
I’ve just read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I know, I know, you all read it two years ago, where have I been – well I meant to read it but didn’t get to it, but I spotted it at the library the other day and grabbed it.
Absolutely extraordinary novel. Shockingly readable, for one thing, in the way thrillers are supposed to be but mostly (for me) aren’t, and also fascinating in multiple ways.
Consider item (or entry or chapter) 181 for instance. It starts ‘I see everything’ then goes on to enumerate the detail with which Christopher does indeed see and notice, if not everything, at least a great deal more than non-autistic people do.
That is why I don’t like new places. If I am in a place I know, like home, or school, or the bus, or the shop, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to do is look at the things that have changed or moved.
That’s a deeply interesting observation all by itself – and it’s just one piece of the four page entry.
But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bumping off something and carrying on in almost the same direction, e.g., when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball. And the information in their head is really simple.
Then he describes what we see or notice if we’re in ‘the countryside,’ and it’s all generalities – grass, some cows, some flowers, a few clouds, a village, a fence; then he gives just a sample of the detail with which he sees the same thing. It’s fascinating because in one way (or perhaps several ways) our way is the ‘right’ way or at least better, and obviously so – just for one thing he doesn’t enjoy the process, it’s overwhelming; that is, as he says, why he doesn’t like new places. But in another way clearly he has a powerful ability that we just don’t have. We’re lazy. We don’t think of it that way of course, and rightly so, in a sense – we’re not lazy, we’re selective, and we need to be; most of the time we need to select out excess detail and just take in generalities. But – it is at least interesting to think of it as lazy.
Christopher concludes 181 with
And that is why I am good at chess and maths and logic, because most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren’t connected and are silly, like ‘I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.’
We’re lazy and we’re almost blind; we don’t see most things.
My first impulse when I read that was to think yes but our mental lives are much richer because our minds can wander and we can imagine and daydream. But then my second impulse was to second-guess that thought, to realize that yes that kind of mental life seems preferable and richer to us because that is the kind of mental life we have (and thus prefer); and Christopher does find much of the world intensely aversive. But all the same, it’s a trade-off. We’re not good at logic, which means we’re not good at various kinds of highly useful thinking.
My next thought was that probably many people think of other people who do value reason and logic as being like Christopher – skilled (if they are) but profoundly impoverished. Not that I didn’t know that, of course, it’s just that that passage is a brilliant illustration of it.
And the whole novel is full of things like that. That one is perhaps my favourite, but there are lots more. An amazing book.
I liked that book a lot too…and hadn’t thought about it in that light.
Yes, great book.
We have such a young man in our group of families who play together, and that book made it a lot easier to understand him. The illumination you describe is excellent; thanks for reminding me of it.
The author had that insight, imagined it from competing points of view, and presented it to you fresh from the viewpoint you hadn’t been privileged with before. What a thinker that author must be!
This is a good comment on a book that I also really enjoyed.
Your analysis of it reminds me of Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious”, about a young man with absolutely perfect memory, who can’t make generalizations because he is so mindful of the details; to quote the Wikipedia entry on it, he is “incapable of Platonic ideas, of generalities, of abstraction; his world is one of intolerably uncountable details”.
“What a thinker that author must be!”
Really. I was thinking that the whole time I was reading (without its interfering with the experience of reading). It’s a really extraordinarily thoughtful – thought-full – novel.
Yes, Christopher has to be Asperger’s, I think; he’s obviously very ‘high-functioning’ in some ways.
“It’s a really extraordinarily thoughtful – thought-full – novel.”
OB, a good Seattle morning to you, I hope. It is, as per usual, here in Dublin, ‘raining cats and dogs.’
It is ironic really; from your review, that Mark Haddon takes the reader into the chaos of autism and creates a character of such empathy. Yet, in actuality, people with autism do not; themselves possess empathy for other people,
Indeed they don’t – that’s where much of the book’s terrible power comes from. There’s one wrenching moment when Christopher’s father is devastated; Christopher simply notes that tears are running down his father’s face, as he might note water pouring down the drain. There’s also of course the agonizing contrivance his parents came up with as a substitute for hugging, since Christopher doesn’t like hugging.
“Christopher doesn’t like hugging”
Many people with autism have a condensed sensitivity to pain, but are abnormally receptive to sound, touch, or other sensory stimulus. These atypical reactions may add to behavioural symptoms such as a battle to being cuddled or hugged. Christopher, doubtless to append, would have survived the livelong day in Goldenbridge, as children there, as you already know, OB & B&W were never, hugged or cuddled, that is, unless they were pets, which very few were, sadly to day. These positive things were as alien to them as were mothers, fathers, and tender loving guardians, who were acting in loco- parentis. Christopher, also, would not have suffered from the daily physical beatings either, as he would not from them have felt too much smarting, due to his autistic condition.
I loved the book too, especially the beginning where the boy explains how engages with the world. Had all the fascination of those Oliver Sacks tales of people who see the world askew and thus help those of us hearing the tales see it afresh.
A friend of mine has a job helping students with autism or Aspergers(usually doing physics or mathematics or engineering) attend university. He has to teach them how to speak to people and how to react to them – these guys learn it like a diplomat would have once learned ceremony at a foreign court.
“He has to teach them how to speak to people and how to react to them – these guys learn it like a diplomat would have once learned ceremony at a foreign court.”
Isn’t that us Two Cultures anyway? Maybe scientific thinking is a form of autism.
(NO THATS A JOKE DAMMIT)
You see Chrisper. A person with normal social abilities does not have to tell you that a joke is a joke. Condemned out of your own keyboard.
Well it’s not entirely a joke – that’s part of why the quoted passage (along with many others) is so fascinating: the hypertrophy of certain abilities and the complete lack of others clearly does enable certain science-related skills. And of course it’s well known that computer geeks are often autistic or autistic-like.
“Intellectual giants of the twentieth century” (including Einstein, Freud, Yeats, the philosophers Russell and Wittgenstein, and the mathematicians Ramanujan and Turing) had high functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome” Moreover, in his book, Michael Fitzgerald (professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin) advocates and consolidates a more positive perspective on autism: that this fascinating condition might be a necessary ingredient of human creativity, perhaps even the crucial ingredient
Re: above posting. Oh Dear! that is according to Iain McClure, consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist
Poets & other artists can be pretty socially impossible as well, come to think of it, though usually because they’re wrapped up in their work or depressed because it isn’t going well.
The amount of famous people past and present who purportedly had/have some form of autism or other is absolutely staggering. The list goes on forever, with notables such as Bob Dylan, and Mozart. See: famous people with ASD. There is a wealth of knowledge on the website concerning the disorder which I have been reading. It is indeed mind blowing.