I returned only a few months later to Paris, to the Salpêtrière, to the lacquered hotel room, not as an “I” but as a “we,” the other party constituting the “we” being a neuroscientist nervously practicing a talk about working memory to be given at an interview for a position across the country from where he lived—where I lived. He read a draft of a piece I was writing about Augustine and pointed out my tendency to slip into the passive voice when writing about myself. Berserk with vulnerability, I explained that this was reflective of how I experienced my illness as a force that directed both what I did and what happened to me, akin to the id. To write about my illness in the first-person active voice often feels only conditionally appropriate, expresses only one component of the situation in which I am also lived by illness.

As I climbed out of our room’s bathtub one morning, a slab of marble broke and fell onto my foot. I did not need to explain the inflammatory aspects of my disease to my companion, as I had an injury to demonstrate them in real time. I felt that the episode might serve as an appropriate description about the way I lived—things fell apart around me, and from within me, and I tried with great force to achieve liminal states such that I might be able to push through them, often worsening the impact. The icy streets helped control the swelling as we walked—I hobbled—around the city, frenetic with excitement, speaking of, among many things, physiological markers and their role in the production of concepts, and Céline’s medical dissertation: a novel about Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician now thought of as the father of antisepsis, who was ostracized after suggesting that if physicians in Vienna’s obstetrical clinics washed and disinfected their hands, their alarming fatality rates would decrease: “Semmelweis dashed himself against obstacles which, there is little doubt, most of the rest of us would have overcome by the exercise of simple prudence, and elementary politeness . . . In human terms, he lacked tact.” The doctors found his suggestion insulting and mocked him. Semmelweis suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues, where he died. Pasteur confirmed his germ theory years later.

I said, in jest, that the account reminded me of how Freud had written of Nachträglichkeit—or “afterwardsness,” the idea that memory is in a sense “reprinted” in accordance with later experience—a century before scientists meaningfully studied memory reconsolidation; how, when scientists and clinicians spoke of Freud, it so often seemed as though they were describing an esoteric mystic who believed psyches to be detached from the physical processes of the body, instead of a materialist committed to the explanatory power of poetic gesture, as I had come to think of him. We have never stopped trying to describe these things to each other. Whenever an incision is made into the eternal entanglement of history and pathology, lives flood out and follow us like ghosts.