As I drew closer I saw what was happening. She was imitating the passers-by-- if 'imitation' is not too pallid, to passive, a word. Should we say, rather, that she was caricaturing everyone she passed? Within a second, a split second, she 'had' them all.
I have seen countless mimes and mimics, clowns and antics, but nothing touched the horrible wonder I now beheld: this virtually instantaneous, automatic and convulsive mirroring of every face and figure. But it was not just an imitation, extraordinary as that would have been in itself. The woman not only took on, and took in, the features of countless people, she took them off. Every mirroring was also a parody, a mocking, an exaggeration of salient gestures and expressions...
...Suddenly, desperately, the old woman turned aside, into an alley-way which led off the main street. And there, with all the appearances of a woman violently sick, she expelled, tremendously accelerated and abbreviated, all the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the demeanors, the entire behavioral repertoires, of the past forty or fifty people she had passed. She delivered one vast, pantomimic egurgitation, in which the engorged identities of the last fifty people who had possessed her were spewed out.
For... the Touretter is driven by extravagant impulse-- impulse of which he is both the creator and the victim, impulse he may repudiate, but cannot disown. Thus he is impelled... into an ambiguous relation with his disorder: vanquishing it, being vanquished by it, playing with it-- there is every variety of conflict and collusion.
Oliver Sacks, The Possessed, from, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
*
As you see, from the same principle we derived quite different codes, because along the way you gave up the lucid view and considered it more convenient (you would have said a matter of indifference) for another to do your thinking for you and for millions of other Germans. Because you tired of fighting heaven, you relaxed in that exhausting adventure in which you had to mutilate souls and destroy the world. In short, you chose injustice and sided with the gods.
Albert Camus, Letters to a German Friend, from, Resistance, Rebellion and Death
*
I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.
Whoever you are, you are to hold your own at any hazard,
These shows of the east and west are tame compared to you,
These immense meadows, these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they,
These furies, elements, storms, motions of nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he
or she who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.
The hopples fall from your ankles! you find an unfailing sufficiency!
Old, young, male, female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself,
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted,
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.
Walt Whitman, To You, Whoever You Are
