But when we do, like this morning, her image is as vivid as it ever was– her dark eyes as bright, her odd smile just as annoying. I’m not crazy.
(Callahan, 369: first and second paragraph proper)
“I’m not crazy” is more than just an harbinger of his subsequent scientific rationalization. It is a statement that disavows him of all the accountability he would have otherwise if we weren’t slaves to our body and its complex mechanism. “I’m not crazy,” can also be a justification for the unspoken emotion that he keeps occult because he thinks that his love towards his wife is logical and sane within the context of science, within the context of how human are really made as. He is, however, very careful not to mix the visceral and scientific justification together. He leaves it up to the reader to decide whether he is crazy or not; Is he crazy because of all those scientific jargon that he spews out, or that he sees his dead wife, or even whether he is crazy because he is trying to blur the boundary between emotions and science to make the sighting of his dead wife “as real as it ever was”. But one thing for sure, he is playing with a dualism and as with dualism, the hierarchy vanishes or it fluctuates all the time. In the last sentence of the previous paragraph, the use of “as” is ubiquitous and at the same time very effective. Are thoughts “as” real as the reality? Are the phantom and immunological memories of her wife as real as wife? I think we see the dualism here again in the form of an oxymoron: “dark eyes as bright”; “odd smile as annoying.” This paragraph break between these two sentences not only marks his attempt to make sense of his imagination, but also a declaration that for some people “as” is as real as the REAL.
