Intuition

Happening to be turning the pages of Lermontov's 'A hero of our own times' this morning, I was struck by his intuition of 1840 or so - bottom of page 103 to top of page 104 - that people who are crippled in body can also be crippled in mind. An intuition borne out by current thinking, in which large parts of the body, like limbs, occupy correspondingly large chunks of the brain to look after them. So craftsmen - like pianists - might have large chunks of brain devoted to hands and athletes might have large chunks of brain devoted to legs. The fact that the external part might go missing, perhaps by being shot off in a battle, does not immediately affect the internal part, which might well continue to function for a while. With what happens after that being anybody's guess.

But there must be a better way of getting two images into a blog. I could not get the layout to work when putting two images into one post, although I dare say there is a way. So as it is, I joined the two scanned images by inserting them into a Word document, then copied and pasted from Word to Paint. Then select, new and save in Paint to crop of the bits of the Word window which were not needed here. With the rather illegible result above, illegible even when one clicks to enlarge. Too much resolution has been lost in too many translations.

A better version of the first image can be found at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/ho1.jpg and of the second at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/ho2.jpg.

PS: just been amused by a bit in the Wikipedia article about the book: 'in Ian Fleming's 'From Russia with Love' the plot revolves on Soviet agent Natasha Romanova feigning an infatuation with MI6's James Bond and offering to defect to the West provided he'll be sent to pick her up in Istanbul, Turkey. The Soviets invent a complex backstory about how she spotted the file about the English spy during her clerical work at SMERSH headquarters and became smitten with him, making her claim that his picture made her think of Lermontov's Pechorin. The fact that Pechorin was all but a 'hero' or even a positive character at all in Lermontov's narration stands to indicate Fleming's wry self-deprecating wit about his most famous creation; the irony is lost, however, on western readers not familiar with Lermontov's work'. I don't recall noticing, despite several readings of both books. [editor's note: various Wikitypos corrected]