The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers Page B

could do for him was to keep him with us for a spell. I judged that what he needed most was rest in sympathetic surroundings while he found his feet.
    But also there was something in it for me. I enjoyed our sessions together because I discovered that what Hassid wanted, once he had recovered his centre of gravity, was to talk about his passion.
    It is a feature of our profession that you are exposed to others’ interests and concerns. Thus, in the course of my duties, I have learned something of seamanship, sheep breeding, tax inspection (and tax avoidance), domestic science, the Petrarchan sonnet, horticulture, dentistry, astrology, astronomy, bell-ringing and the rudiments of how to fly a helicopter.
    Hassid’s ruling passion, I discovered, was quantum mechanics. He was mad for Schrödinger’s cat, he idolised Dirac, he worshipped Niels Bohr. What intrigued me most, so far as my limited scientific intelligence was able to comprehend it, was Hassid’s account of their account of the nature of reality.
    The structure of existence, which he attempted to convey to me—though often his words flowed by too fast for me properly to grasp them—was a thrilling and disturbing one, a tentative world of ambiguous possibilities rather than things or facts. Electrons, he explained, existed as a sort of misty potential,occupying no physical space in the material world but summoned into being only when a human measurement was made to determine their location.
    ‘You see, Doctor,’ Hassid said, ‘it is not that electrons are here waiting, like invisible germs to be discovered under the microscope—’
    ‘Or black swans waiting to be discovered in Australia?’ I interjected in an effort to show I was following.
    But Hassid politely dismissed this. ‘Not swans, no, Doctor, not even black ones, because, you see, this is not a question of induction. Electrons are not, in the sense we mean it generally, here at all.’ His expression became sage.
    I’ve always thought it remarkable that, while our bodies stand in the visible world, we ourselves are not in the world of three dimensions and our inner life has no position in space. And, equally, how little of another person’s reality is visible to us. We see their form, their features, their shifts of expression but all that constitutes their sense of self remains unseen. And yet this invisible self is what to the individual constitutes their real identity. I wondered, as I limped behind his explanations, if Hassid’s electrons were somewhat similar.
    ‘It is like a thought before one performs an action. The electron is no place and then’—he waved his elegant hand like a graceful conjuror—‘presto! Suddenly it is here, coming into existence out of seeming nothingness—but it is we’—excitedly he gestured at his chest—‘who bring it out. By what we do to it, you see, we give its state reality.’ His face glowed with intense pleasure at the arcane mystery he was initiating me into.
    It wasn’t so surprising, I reflected after one of Hassid’s‘seminars’, that he’d been mistaken for psychotic. The reality he described had its mad element. For one thing, it seemed to place human understanding at a central place in the universe. But then, great wits are oft to madness near allied. He was an engaging boy. And I warmed to him. But I worried that my feeble scientific understanding was insufficient to aid his adjustment to the ordinary world.
    The day after Elizabeth Cruikshank had uttered those cryptic words to me I called by Maguire’s office and found her chatting to Hassid over the library trolley.
    ‘What’s going on here?’
    ‘Hassid’s helping us out.’ Making people useful was one of Maguire’s rehabilitation principles.
    ‘Sister wants me to look after the book trolley, you see, Doctor.’
    The greater part of the library collection was the dud end of the old county library supply. Other books had been donated, or left behind, by patients or their