It is the dull ones that are sick, those whose souls sing neither
compassion for others nor their own anger. All those numerous people are
sick who, like a violin without strings, merely echo every sound. Or
would you say that the man whose memory is like a photographic plate on
which the light has fallen and which cannot record any more impressions,
is the healthy man? Is not memory the very highest possession of every
human being? It is the treasure that animals do not own, because they
are incapable of holding the past and reviving it.

Am I to be cured of my memory as from an illness? Why, without my memory
I would not be myself, because every man is built up of his memories and
really lives only as long as he goes through life like a loaded camera.
Supposing I could not tell where I lived in my childhood, what color my
father's eyes and my mother's hair were, and supposing at any moment
that I were called upon to give an account, I could not turn the leaves
of the past and point to the right picture, how quick they would be to
diagnose my case as feeblemindedness, or imbecility. Then, to be
considered mentally normal, must one treat one's brain like a slate to
be sponged off and be able at command to tear out pictures that have
burned the most hideous misery into the soul, and throw them away as one
does leaves from an album of photographs?

One man died before my eyes, he died hard, torn asunder after a
frightful struggle between the two Titans, Life and Death. Am I sick,
then, if I experience all over again all the phases of his agonizing--
preserved in my brain like snapshots--as long as every happening
inexorably opens the pages of this series? And the other people, are
they well, those, I mean, who skip the pages as though they were blank
that record the dismemberment, the mutilation, the crushing of their
brothers, the slow writhing to death of men caught in barbed wire