{"product_id":"things-i-didnt-know-isbn-9780307385987","title":"Things I Didn't Know","description":"Robert Hughes has trained his critical eye on many major subjects, from the city of Barcelona to the history of his native Australia. Now he turns that eye inward, onto himself and the world that formed him. Hughes analyzes his experiences the way he might examine a Van Gogh or a Picasso. From his relationship with his stern and distant father to his Catholic upbringing and school years; and from his development as an artist, writer, and critic to his growing appreciation of art and his exhilaration at leaving Australia to discover a new life, Hughes’ memoir is an extraordinary feat of exploration and celebration. | “Riveting. . . . Marvelously entertaining. . . . Hughes’ portraits of people he knew in his youth often display the bravura touch that has distinguished his best journalism.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e“[Hughes] deftly intertwines personal and cultural history in this fiercely erudite memoir. . . . A fascinating examination of artistic patrimony and the formation of a critic.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e“Splendid. . . . Hughes has turned his hand to autobiography, with predictably and gratifyingly rewarding results.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e“Hughes is the sort of ebullient writer who floods his reader with great bursting accumulations of words and gets carried away with the sheer exuberance of his narrative.  It is compelling.  You don’t want to miss a sentence” —\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/i\u003e | \u003cb\u003eRobert Hughes\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Australia in 1938. Since 1970 he has lived and worked in the United States, where until 2001 he was chief art critic for \u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e, to which he still contributes. His books include \u003ci\u003eThe Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, Nothing if Not Critical, Barcelona, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eGoya\u003c\/i\u003e. He is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes for his work. | chapter one    A Bloody Expat      The most extreme change in my life occurred, out of a blue sky, on the  30th of May, 1999, a little short of my sixty-first birthday.    I was in Western Australia, where I had been making a TV series about my  native country. I had taken a couple of days off, and chosen to spend them  fishing off the shore of a resort named Eco Beach with a friend, Danny  O’Sullivan, a professional guide. We went after small offshore tuna, with  fly rods, in an open skiff. It had been a wonderful day: fish breaking  everywhere, fighting fiercely when hooked, and one—a small bluefin, about  twenty pounds—kept to be eaten later with the crew in Broome.    Now, after a nap, I was on my way back to the Northern Highway, which  parallels the huge flat biscuit of a coast where the desert breaks off  into the Indian Ocean.    After about ten kilometers, the red dirt road from Eco Beach ended in a  cattle gate. I stopped short of it, got out of the car, unhooked the  latching chain, swung the gate open. I got back in the car, drove through,  stopped again, got out, and closed the gate behind me. Then I hopped back  in the car again and drove out onto the tar and concrete of the Great  Northern Highway, cautiously looking both ways in the bright, almost  horizontal evening light. No road trains galloping toward me: nothing  except emptiness. I turned left, heading north for Broome, on the left  side of the road, as people have in Australia ever since 1815, when its  colonial governor, an autocratic laird named Lachlan Macquarie, decreed  that Australians must henceforth ride and drive on the same side as people  did in his native Scotland.    It was still daylight, but only just. I flipped my lights on.    There was no crash, no impact, no pain. It was as though nothing had  happened. I just drove off the edge of the world, feeling nothing.    I do not know how fast I was going.    I am not a fast driver, or in any way a daring one. Driving has never been  second nature to me. I am pawky, old-maidish, behind the wheel. But I  collided, head-on, with another car, a Holden Commodore with two people in  the front seat and one in the back. It was dusk, about 6:30 p.m. This was  the first auto accident I ever had in my life, and I retain absolutely no  memory of it. Try as I may, I can dredge nothing up, not even the memory  of fear. The slate is wiped clean, as by a damp rag.    I was probably on the wrong (that is, the right-hand) side of the road,  over the yellow line—though not very far over. I say “probably” because,  at my trial a year later, the magistrate did not find that there was  enough evidence to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that I had been. The  Commodore was coming on at some 90 m.p.h., possibly more. I was  approaching it at about 50 m.p.h.. Things happen very quickly when two  cars have a closing speed of more than 130 m.p.h. It only takes a second  for them to get seventy feet closer to one another. No matter how hard you  hit the brakes, there isn’t much you can do.    We plowed straight into one another, Commodore registered 7ex 954 into  Nissan Pulsar registered 9 yr 650: two red cars in the desert, driver’s  side to driver’s side, right headlamp to right headlamp. I have no memory  of this. From the moment of impact for weeks to come, I would have no  short-term memory of anything. All I know about the actual collision,  until after almost a year, when I saw the remains of my rented car in a  junkyard in Broome, is what I was told by others.    The other car spun off the highway, skidded down a shallow dirt slope, and  ended up half-hidden in the low desert scrub. Its three occupants were  injured, two not seriously. Darren William Kelly, thirty-two, the driver,  had just come off a stint working on a fishing boat and was heading south  to Port Hedland to find any work he could get. He had a broken tibia.  Colin Craig Bowe, thirty-six, a builder’s laborer, was riding in the front  seat and sustained a broken ankle. Darryn George Bennett, twenty-four, had  been working as a deckhand on the same boat as Kelly, the True Blue. Kelly  and Bowe were mates; they had known each other for two years. Neither had  known Bennett before. He had heard they were driving south to Port  Hedland, and he asked for a ride. He was a young itinerant worker in his  midtwenties, whose main skill was bricklaying.    Their encounter with the world of writing only added to their misfortunes.  All three were addicts and part-time drug dealers. At the moment of the  crash, Bennett, in the backseat, was rolling a “cone” of marijuana, a  joint. It may or may not have been the first one to be smoked on what was  meant to be a thousand-kilometer drive south.    In any case, they had things in common. They had all done jail time. They  were young working-class men living now on that side of the law, now on  this: sometimes feral, sometimes bewildered, seldom knowing what the next  month, let alone the next birthday, would bring.    Not long after he had recovered from the injuries of the collision,  Bennett tried to tear the face off an enemy in a bar with a broken bottle.  Bowe, as soon as his injuries had healed, attempted an armed robbery, but  was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in jail.    Bennett was by far the worst hurt of the three. The impact catapulted him  forward against the restraint of the seat belt and gave him a perforated  bowel. He had no skeletal damage. All three of them were able to struggle  out of the wreck of the Commodore, which had not rolled over. The effort  of doing so was agonizing for Bennett, who collapsed on the verge of the  road, his guts flooded with pain.    If the Commodore was badly smashed up, my Nissan Pulsar was an inchoate  mass of red metal and broken glass, barely recognizable as having once  been a car. When at last I saw it in Broome on the eve of my trial, eleven  months later, I couldn’t see how a cockroach could have survived that  wreck, let alone a human being.    The car had telescoped. The driver’s seat had slammed forward, pinning me  against the steering wheel, which was twisted out of shape by the impact  of my body, nearly impaling me on the steering column. Much of the  driver’s side of the Pulsar’s body had been ripped away, whether by the  initial impact or, later, by the hydraulic tools used by the fire brigade  and ambulance crew in their long struggle to free me from the wreckage. It  looked like a half-car. It was as though the fat, giant foot of God from  the old Monty Python graphics had stamped on it and ground it into the  concrete. Later, I would make derogatory noises about “that piece of Jap  shit” I’d been driving. I was wrong, of course. The damage had saved my  life: the gradual collapse and telescoping of the Nissan’s body,  compressed into milliseconds, had absorbed and dissipated far more of the  impact energy than a more rigid frame could have done.    Now it was folded around me like crude origami. I could scarcely move a  finger. Trapped, intermittently conscious, deep in shock and bloodier than  Banquo, I had only the vaguest notion of what had happened to me. Whatever  it might have been, it was far beyond my experience. I did not recognize  my own injuries, and had no idea how bad they were. As it turned out, they  were bad enough. Under extreme impact, bones may not break neatly. They  can explode into fragments, like a cookie hit by a hammer, and that’s what  happened to several of mine.    The catalog of trauma turned out to be long. Most of it was concentrated  on the right-hand side of my body—the side that bore the brunt of the  collision. As the front of the Nissan collapsed, my right foot was forced  through the floor and doubled underneath me; hours later, when my rescuers  were at last able to get a partial glimpse of it, they thought the whole  foot had been sheared off at the ankle. The chief leg bones below my right  knee, the tibia and the fibula, were broken into five pieces. The knee  structure was more or less intact, but my right femur, or thigh bone, was  broken twice, and the ball joint that connected it to my hip was damaged.  Four ribs on my right side had snapped and their sharp ends had driven  through the tissue of my lungs, lacerating them and causing pneumothorax,  a deflation of the lungs and the dangerous escape of air into the chest  cavity. My right collarbone and my sternum were broken. The once rigid  frame of my chest had turned wobbly, its structural integrity gone, like a  crushed birdcage. My right arm was a wreck—the elbow joint had taken some  of the direct impact, and its bones were now a mosaic of breakages. But I  am left-handed, and the left arm was in better shape, except for the hand,  which had been (in the expressive technical term used by doctors)  “de-gloved,” stripped of its skin and much of the muscular structure  around the thumb.    But I had been lucky. Almost all the damage was skeletal. The internal  soft tissues, liver, spleen, heart, were undamaged, or at worst merely  bruised and shocked. My brain was intact—although it wasn’t working very  well—and the most important part of my bone structure, the spine, was  untouched.    That was a near miracle. Spines go out of service all too easily. The  merest hairline crack in the spine can turn a healthy, reasonably athletic  man into a paralyzed cripple: this is what happened to poor Christopher  Reeve, the former Superman, in a fall from a horse, and it eventually  killed him. The idea of being what specialists laconically call a “high  quad”—paraplegic from the neck down, unable even to write your own end by  loading a shotgun and sticking its muzzle in your mouth—has always  appalled me.    But I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to be afraid of that. What I was  afraid of, and mortally, was burning to death. Some are afraid of heights,  others of rats, or mad dogs, or of death by drowning. My especial terror  is fire, and now I realized that my nostrils were full of the banal stench  of gasoline. Somewhere in the Nissan a line had ruptured. I could not  move. I could only wait. There seemed to be little point in praying; in  any case, there is   no entity I believe in enough to pray to. Samuel Johnson once said that   the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully. The  prospect, extended over hours, of dying in a gasoline fireball does much  the same. It dissolves your more commonplace troubles—money, divorce,   the difficulty of writing—and shows you what you really want to use your  life for.    At one point I saw Death. He was sitting at a desk, like a banker. He made  no gesture, but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat,  which distended to become a tunnel: the bocca d’inferno of old Christian  art. He expected me to yield, to go in. This filled me with abhorrence, a  hatred of nonbeing. Not fear, exactly: more like passionate revolt. In  that moment I realized that there is nothing whatever outside of the life  we have; that the “meaning of life” is nothing other than life itself,  obstinately asserting itself against emptiness and nullity. Life was so  powerful, so demanding, and in my concussion and delirium, even as my  systems were shutting down, I wanted it so much. Whatever this was, it was  nothing like the nice, uplifting kind of near-death experience that  religious writers, particularly those of an American-style fundamentalist  bent, like to effuse about. Perhaps the simple truth is that, near death,  you have visions and hallucinations of what most preoccupies you in life.  I am a skeptic to whom the idea that a benign God created us and watches  over us is something between a fairy story and a bad joke. People of a  religious bent, however, are apt under such conditions to see the familiar  kitsch of near-death experience—the tunnel of white light with Jesus at  the end, as featured in the uplifting accounts of a score of American  Kmart mystics. Jesus must have been busy with them when my time came: he  didn’t show. There was, as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing on the  other side.    So I was stuck; unable to move, and no more than intermittently conscious.  Later, Kelly would testify that despite the injury to his leg he was able  to make his way to my car and ask me what had happened; that I asked him  the same question, and said, “I’m sorry, mate, I’m terribly sorry, I’m not  sure if I fell asleep.” It has always been my habit to apologize first and  ask questions later, and Sgt. Matt Turner, the Broome officer who was the  first policeman at the scene, would later recount that I showed an almost  silly degree of courtesy as rescue workers tried to extract me from the  wreck, apologizing again and again for the inconvenience I was causing him  and them.    It would be some hours before these rescuers got to the crash site. The  person who set the machinery of rescue going had already been there. He  was a middle-aged Aborigine named, rather fittingly, Joe Fishhook. He and  his family lived nearby, at an Aboriginal settlement not far from Eco  Beach named Bidyadanga. He was driving south in his truck, with his wife,  Angie Wilridge, and their teenage daughter Ruth, along with a few members  of their extended family, when the Commodore overtook them, zooming past  at what he guessed to be about a hundred miles an hour. (Later, a police  observer at the scene of the crash looked at the speedometer of the  Commodore and saw that the needle was stuck by the collision impact at 150  k.p.h., about 90 m.p.h.)    Shortly afterward Fishhook came upon the wreck and saw the remains of my  Pulsar straddling the center line of the highway. He stopped, got out, and  tried but failed to free me from the wreck. I was crushed into it, like a  sardine in a can squashed by a hammer. Fishhook gingerly checked that I  was still breathing, but he couldn’t find any document that identified me.  He checked the back of the Pulsar—the hatch door, at least, opened—and  looked inside the cooler, finding the little tuna. Something snagged his  attention. The fish was fresh, newly caught, but there was no tackle in  the car. So I must have been fishing with someone else’s gear. That meant  a professional guide. And how many such pros were there on this stretch of  coast? Only one that Fishhook knew of—Danny O’Sullivan, a few kilometers  away at Eco Beach, which was also where the nearest phone was.    After this excellent deduction, leaving his wife and daughter at the  wreck, Fishhook spun a U-turn and drove back to the Eco turnoff. Twenty  minutes later, burning red gravel all the way, he found Danny in the  resort bar. Did he have a client who was taking a little bluefin home to  Broome? Sure, said Danny: my mate Bob Hughes. Well, said Joey Fishhook  equably, you better get up the road quick smart: he’s wrecked on the  highway, he’s in deep shit, your mate is.    Danny rang the Broome police. He rang the Broome hospital. He sprinted  downstairs, with Joey Fishhook close behind him. The two men took off in  their cars, Danny accompanied by a former ambulance officer who now worked  at the Eco Beach resort, Lorraine Lee. When the heat is on, Danny has a  foot on the accelerator heavier than a rhino’s, and he reached the crash  site in almost no time at all, by 6:45 p.m. He checked me out. I was as  white as dirty skim milk and my breathing was shallow; I was sliding into  a coma. “Bob, Bob mate, come on, bastard, wake up.” I could hear him, but  he seemed very far away, as though we were in mutually distant rooms of a  large, echoing house.    Lorraine Lee had brought some towels, with which she stanched the flow of  blood from my head and left hand. I kept straining to hear Danny, but the  effort was frustrated by waves of pain from my collarbone. Danny has a  hand tough enough to strangle a crocodile. Fishing with him in the past, I  have seen him reach lightning fast into a small line of breaking water and  seize a passing shovelnose shark by the tail, hoicking it out of the wave  with a feral grin of pleasure. Unfortunately, he now had my shoulder in a  vise-like grip. It was meant to be comradely and reassuring, but he was  squeezing broken bone. “You’re going to be fine, mate,” he was saying  encouragingly. The pain was taking me over. “Oh Danny,” I whined, “it  hurts, it hurts so much, it’s really bad, make it stop.” He kept squeezing  the broken bone, sending bolts of fresh anguish through me. “She’ll be  right, cobber,” he said. “She’s going to be right as rain. Just hang in  there.” Squeeze from him, squawk from me. It took a few minutes to get  cause and effect straightened out.    Then something passed between us that may never have happened; I am still  not sure. I kept passing out and waking woozily up, and whenever I  surfaced into consciousness I could still smell the petrol, that sickly  smell building up to finish me off with one spark. I didn’t want to die at  all, but most of all I didn’t want to die that way. I thought Danny owned  a .38, and I implored him to finish me off if the car blew. “Just kill  me,” I kept saying, or thought I did. “Just take me out, one shot, you  know what to do.” And he, I think, swore that he would. But I do not know,  and, looking back on it, I realize that I had asked the morally impossible  of my friend, so perhaps I had never really asked it at all. I don’t know,  and on a very deep level I remain uncertain and afraid to ask. But the  desire to die before I could burn was very strong.    The absurdity made me sick. I thought of dying without ever seeing my  sweetheart Doris again, never feeling that silky skin or hearing that soft  voice in my ear. I had been through so many erotic miseries and  matrimonial weirdnesses to reach Doris, the first woman ever to make me  completely happy—and now it seemed that I would never revisit the paradise  of the senses and the ecstasy of mutual trust to which she had granted me  access. Instead there would be the opposite of paradise. It wasn’t dying  as such that I feared, but dying in a hot blast, the air sucked out of my  lungs, strangling on flame inside an uprushing column of unbearable heat:  everything the Jesuits had told me about the crackling and eternal terrors  of Hell now came back, across a chasm of fifty years. I could envision  this. It would look like one of the Limbourg brothers’ illustrations to  the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry—the picture of Satan bound down on  a fiery grid, exhaling a spiral of helpless little burned souls into the  air.    But the fire didn’t come. Neither did the fire brigade, nor the police,  nor an ambulance. Some passing traffic stopped, including a semitrailer  truck. Quite an array of vehicles was beginning to build up to the north  and south of my Nissan, and these included some cars and four-wheel-drive  pick-  ups (known in Australia as “utes,” short for “utility vehicles”) driven by  Aborigines. It being Friday night, there was meant to be a dance at the  Bidyadanga settlement, and by twos and threes a curious group of  Aborigines began to accumulate by the wreck.    They were behind me, so I couldn’t see them. I could hear them, though: a  thin chanting, to the beat of handclaps, to which I could attach no  meaning. Later I was told that the Aborigines had assembled in a  half-circle behind my car, and were trying to sing me back to life. It  must have seemed unlikely that they would succeed, but one person who was  convinced they would was Joey Fishhook’s teenage daughter. She later said  she saw what she stubbornly insisted was a spirit-apparition, not far from  the Nissan. It was of   no particular color. It looked in all respects human, except that it moved  through the bush soundlessly, with a sort of elusive lightness.    This creature, or entity, is known to Aborigines as a feather-foot. It is  not easy to say what a feather-foot is, or what it does. It is definitely  not an animal spirit. It is a native equivalent of the Greek manifestation  of Hermes   as an emissary of Hades, in his role as Hermes Psychopompos, the “guider  of souls.” It is neither hostile nor friendly: it just turns up at the  site of an impending or possible death, and passes judgment on the soul  and its prospects of survival in further incarnations. I didn’t see it, of  course; even if it had been there, my vision was too blurred to see  anything quick moving, and I couldn’t turn my head. But I like to think  that perhaps it was a feather-foot, and that it had not found me  altogether unacceptable.    Whether it could boast a real feather-foot or not, the Bidyadanga  settlement did have its own nurse, a Filipina Catholic religious sister  named Juliana Custodio. As soon as word about the collision reached her at  Bidyadanga, she drove to the site to see if there was anything she could  do. In the event, there wasn’t much. She found me, according to the police  report, “trapped in the car, awake and talking, asking about his fish,  swearing with the pain and then apologizing. Juliana said, ‘He was such a  gentleman!’ She saw that his hip and chest bones were out of alignment . .  . he was sweating and cold but his heart and pulse rate were very strong  and his blood pressure normal.”    Sister Juliana did her best to get a saline IV into one of my veins, but  they had collapsed. She wiped off the worst of the blood and applied some  dressings to my head wounds. I kept sliding into patches of insensibility  and she struggled to keep me awake, not with drugs, but simply by talking  to me. Our conversation can’t have kept my wandering attention, because I  soon gave up on it and started, as I was told later, to count aloud,  backward from a hundred, one number slurring into the next—“forry-five,  forry-four, forry-three . . .” Then I would lose track and have to start  again, at a hundred. I thought I was trying to stay conscious, but Sister  Juliana thought I was counting off my last moments; bystanders saw this  good and devoted woman weeping with pity and frustration. Maybe we were  both right. Later she would ask the Catholic priest at Bidyadanga, Father  Patrick da Silva, to say a Mass for my recovery. “Juliana rang the  hospital in Perth a few times during his stay,” the police report  concludes, “and followed his progress with interest. She kept saying, ‘He  was such a gentleman!’ ”    Meanwhile, a sea fog had rolled in from the Indian Ocean, slowing the  sparse traffic to a crawl. Cars on the Great Northern Highway couldn’t  make more than 60 k.p.h. (40 m.p.h.). It must have been two hours after  the crash, close to nine o’clock, when a rescue team of volunteers from  the Broome Fire Brigade at last reached the spot. Its men tugged and  twisted at the door, but it would hardly budge. Eventually, they brought  out the drastic solution to crushed car bodies—the so-called Jaws of Life,  a massive pair of shears powered by hydraulic pressure. I was only dimly  aware of this tool as it chomped through the Pulsar; I felt apprehensive  but curiously distant as its blades groaned against the metal. Would they  slip and chew my leg off? I didn’t much care; all I wanted was to be out  of the danger of fire, away from the reek of gasoline. I was vaguely aware  of skilled hands wiggling the lower parts of my legs, working them free. I  felt, rather than heard, a resonant crunch deep down in my frame, at some  level of my skeleton that had never been disturbed before, like the deep  crack of an extracted tooth breaking free from the jawbone, as the shears  bit off the spokes of the steering wheel whose rim was crushed into my  thorax. The wheel was lifted free; one of the firemen tossed it in the  back of the car, where I would find it nearly a year later. My whole chest  felt light and empty now that the pressure was   off. There was surprisingly little pain in it: this was due to shock, of  course. Concerned faces were all around me. “I’m sorry about this,” I kept  babbling. “I’m sorry to be so much trouble.” “You’ll be right, mate,” one  of the firemen kept saying. “We’ll have you out of this in two ticks.” And  they did, to my eternal gratitude. I felt a delirious sensation of  lightness as I was lifted clear of the car. They slid a stretcher under  me. My head felt swollen on its feeble stalk of a neck, lolling like a  melon. Was my neck broken? I couldn’t frame the words of the question. At  least I knew I could see and feel, and was alive. Luminescence was all  around me: flashing, stuttering lights, red and orange punctuated by  magnesium flashes, burning in haloes through the fog. In their  intermittent flare I saw the face of Danny O’Sullivan, bending over me.  His mouth turned down hideously—no, it was upside down, so he must be  smiling.    “You’d have to be the toughest old bastard I know, cobber,” he said  encouragingly.    Oh no, Danny, I wanted to say; you know dozens of guys who are tougher  than me; dear God, I’m old and fat and I’m not going to last it through.  “No, no, bullshit,” I managed to croak.    Danny reflected for a moment. “Ah well,” he conceded, “you’d have to be  the toughest old art critic, anyway.”    That’ll do for me, I thought, and promptly swooned, like some crinolined  Virginian lady in a novel. The stretcher locked onto its rails in the  ambulance; it slid in with a clunk, the door slammed, and the medicos bent  over me. I would not wake up for several weeks.    The first doctor to reach me from Broome had been Dr. Barbara Jarad, who  was on call for the Aboriginal Medical Services at the Broome hospital  that night. She had set off with the police in what she laughingly called  “a high-speed pursuit vehicle”—creeping along, because of the fog, at 60  k.p.h. (40 m.p.h.). She talked on the police radio with Sister Juliana,  who said she’d had difficulty getting a needle into me to administer  saline. My veins are weak and recessive; under shock, they become almost  impossible to find, rolling away from the needle. In the ambulance, Dr.  Jarad got a saline needle in my arm, but on the road it ceased to work  long before we reached the Broome hospital; I wasn’t tied down properly  and the rolling of my body and the jolts of the vehicle kept pulling the  needle out of the vein. I kept talking, not very lucidly; I gave the  doctor my name and a few other details, but told her I had been born in  1995. It’s normal procedure to keep a trauma patient talking if you can,  so that you can easily tell if he passes out. At the hospital the medical  head, Dr. Tony Franklin, got another saline feed in my other arm, and Dr.  Jarad did what she called a cut-down on my left, intact ankle, opening up  the skin and flesh with a scalpel to expose a vein; not the easiest of  maneuvers with a fleshy, overweight subject like myself.    It was now somewhat past midnight, almost six hours since the crash. The  Broome hospital had been on the radio to the Flying Doctor Service. It  could fly me more than 1,000 miles south to Perth, the capital of Western  Australia, which had a bigger hospital than Broome’s—one that included an  Intensive Care Unit.    And intensive care was what I was going to need. The doctors in Perth had  me on the operating table for thirteen hours straight and, I was told much  later, they nearly lost me several times. Their work was extraordinary.  All the odds, I take it, were against my survival, and without these  doctors and the immense devotion and skill of their work I could not  possibly have survived. I ended up in semi-stable condition, with tubes  running in and out of me, and a ventilator doing my breathing.    I was in intensive care for five weeks, in a semiconscious delirium, while  the doctors and nurses of Royal Perth Hospital labored to put me together  and bring me back, detail by detail, to life. I don’t know that I’d  recommend to the unwary foreigner that he or she ought to live in West  Australia. But I do know that, if one has the misfortune to undergo a  near-fatal car smash, West Australia—and, specifically, the Royal Perth  Hospital—is an extremely good place to be.            And then he knew no more.” It was the standard exit from an action  paragraph in the books of my childhood: Bulldog Drummond is sapped on the  back of the head, Hero X falls through a trapdoor, Macho Y realizes, all  too late, that the tea he has sipped in the villain’s Shanghai parlor  contained a powerful drug. The room spins, consciousness goes. We wake (if  we are lucky) remembering nothing. Not an erasure, in which the traces of  an earlier design may, however vaguely, be discerned. Instead, a whiteout.    If only.    The word “coma,” if my experience is any guide, covers a host of states  that slide into one another unpredictably.    If “coma” means the cessation of awareness or internal consciousness—the  black hole, the blank wall—then I wasn’t in a coma for those five and a  half weeks in the Intensive Care Unit of Royal Perth.    On the contrary: at least some of the time I was living with (literally)  fantastic intensity, my mind pervaded by narrative phantasms of extreme  clarity and unshakeable, Daliesque vividness. But I couldn’t communicate  them to the outside world, or to anyone in it, including the doctors, the  nurses, and my worried and puzzled friends. I was sealed off, boiling with  hallucination.    I don’t remember feeling frustrated by this: in some way I knew that even  if I had been able to describe these states and narratives, these loved  ones could not have understood their import. It would have taken too much  explaining. This, you might say, was my unconscious mind being smart,  saving its energies as best it could. To explain the details, to show by  what twisting,","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48338554257637,"sku":"NP9780307385987","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307385987.jpg?v=1769572666","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/things-i-didnt-know-isbn-9780307385987","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}