27.12.05

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, “I’m going to ask you to come with me.” They’re always remarkably calm, these agents. If asked “Why do I need to go anywhere with you?” they’ll straighten their shirt cuffs or idly brush stray hairs from the sleeves of their sport coats and say, “Oh, I think we both know why.”

David Sedaris, "Me Talk Pretty One Day"

26.12.05

The Fortress of Solitude

Seated on the chill concrete, I felt a recurrence of my childhood micropsia, a night terror I thought I'd left behind at age eleven or twelve, in my bedroom on Dean Street: the sensation that my body was reduced to a speck size in a universe pounding with gravitational force, a void crushing against me on all sides. The ailanthus branches brushing the back windows had seemed to me then like the spiraled arms of distant galaxies. Later, in the years after I retired the ring, I'd blamed my inability to fly from a rooftop, my preference to look away from the sky, on the micropsia hallucinations. Now, they'd returned to undermine my heroism in the prison. My heroism was used up.

Jonathan Lethem, "The Fortress of Solitude"

Alicia en el País de las Maravillas

La Micropsia, o Síndrome de Alicia en el País de las Maravillas, es un desorden neurológico que afecta a la percepción del ojo humano. Los pacientes perciben los objetos (incluso animales, otras personas o parte de una persona) como sustancialmente mucho más pequeños de lo que son en realidad. Generalmente, los objetos aparecen lejanos al mismo tiempo. Por ejemplo, un animal doméstico, como un perro, puede parecer del tamaño de un ratón, o un coche como un coche de juguete. Esto condujo a otra denominación del síndrome: Lilliput. La patología es en términos de percepción sólo; la visión del ojo no está afectada, sólo la interpretación cerebral de esta visión.

Fuente: www.wikipedia.org