ABSTRACT
Traditional accounts picture its dark glamour and visionary appeal. Like witnesses to a hanging, it is not the victim who tells the tale. Epilepsy scares people for a simple reason. From the Pharaohs to the dawn of Romanticism, seizures were regarded as the visitation of evil spirits. The misapprehension of literature's epileptics as heroic is especially pernicious, but, unlike popular belief, it also carries a nugget of truth. Like writing, teaching also took on a therapeutic dimension: the quest for intellectual coherence and the calm that achieving it engendered. For all its usefulness, though, the quest for coherence can also be too pure a goal, a kind of breathless single-mindedness to which everything else, including pacing oneself, can be sacrificed. The loss of an active external life also includes the unexpected loss of a critical dimension of internal life, unforeseen and, for many years, unknown to the author.
