Holding Hands 2

companion to Holding Hands


"Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is't a riddle?
I should humbly call it a poser, sir.
Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? "

[from Moby Dick]

"a sense of the existence of their lost limb that was more vivid, definite and intrusive than that of its truly living fellow member."

[taken from Silas Weir Mitchell's observations of amputees experience of 'phantom limbs', or, 'Sensory Ghosts' during American Civil War]