"It doesn't even leave much of an animal," Miss Peters said. "He's alive, but that's the best you can say for him. (Now swallow, Paul. That's it.) Even an ameba can find food for itself."
"Yeah. Even a single cell is better off than he is. Chop out a man's forebrain and he's nothing. It's a case of the whole being _less_ than the sum of its parts."
"I'm glad they outlawed the operation on mental patients," Miss Peters said, with a note of disgust in her voice.
Dr. Benwick said: "It's worse than it looks. Do you know why the anti-lobotomists managed to get the bill passed?"
"Let's drink some milk now, Paul. No, Doctor; I was only a little girl at that time."
"It was a matter of electro-encephalographic records. They showed that there was electrical activity in the prefrontal lobes even after the nerves had been severed, which could mean a lot of things; but the A-L supporters said that it indicated that the forebrain was still capable of thinking."
Miss Peters looked a little ill. "Why--that's _horrible_! I wish you'd never told me." She looked at the lump of vegetablized human sitting placidly at the table. "Do you suppose he's actually _thinking_, somewhere, deep inside?"
"Oh, I doubt it," Benwick said hastily. "There's probably no real self-awareness, none at all. There couldn't be."
"I suppose not," Miss Peters said, "but it's not pleasant to think of."
"That's why they outlawed it," said Benwick.
Insanity is a retreat from reality, an escape within the mind from the reality outside the mind. But what if there is no detectable reality outside the mind? What is there to escape from? Suicide--death in any form--is an escape from life. But if death does not come, and can not be self-inflicted, what then?
And when the pressure of nothingness becomes too great to bear, it becomes necessary to escape; a man under great enough pressure will take the easy way out. But if there is no easy way? Why, then a man must take the hard way.
For Paul Wendell, there was no escape from his dark, senseless Gehenna by way of death, and even insanity offered no retreat; insanity in itself is senseless, and senselessness was what he was trying to flee. The only insanity possible was the psychosis of regression, a fleeing into the past, into the crystallized, unchanging world of memory.