The very first two paragraphs of the preface of Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat are as follows:

”The last thing one settles in writing a book,” Pascal observes, “is what one should put in first.” So, having written, collected and arranged these strange tales, having selected a title and two epigraphs, I must now examine what I have done – and why.

The doubleness of the epigraphs and the contrast between them – indeed, the contrast which Ivy McKenzie draws between the physician and the naturalist – corresponds to a certain doubleness in me: that I feel myself a naturalist and a physician both; and that I am equally interested in diseases and people; perhaps, too, that I am equally, if inadequately, a theorist and a dramatist, am equally drawn to the scientific and the romantic, and continually see both in the human condition, not least in that quintessential human condition of sickness – animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.

I have a doubleness in me, too. I believe wholeheartedly in the scientific method and its importance. I am simultaneously something of a transcendentalist and revel in its curvaceous encompassing. I believe in the world of my senses and also the possibility that there is something overarching all of what I can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear.

What doubleness lies at your heart? What seemingly mutually exclusive ideas do you harbor?

Topics: life, ideas, life questions, inconsistencies, double