978-1572305441

102 A MIND APART
of human relationships and are, by most standards, “antisocial.” “What
exactly do ‘normal’ and ‘antisocial’ mean in this context?” I ask myself
each Christmas.
This disparity of abilities, appearance, and human characteristics
presents an incongruous picture. In these adult bodies are hidden childlike
qualities, yet it’s not enough to say their development is arrested.
Even young children lie and are cruel to each other, and an adult with
autism is not like some modern-day Peter Pan who refuses to grow up
and who loves to play children’s games instead. It is the incongruity of
development that is so very striking.
In some ways, the residents of Woodview are typically adult, in
others so innocent and child-like, in yet other ways, quite unique and
remarkable. To see them is to be aware of the fracture of time, how we
are all made of different lines of development that proceed at their own
pace, according to their own timetable. For most of us, the disparate
parts of ourselves develop synchronously, like a harmonious piece of
music. Our abilities keep pace with our interests, our intellect with our
appearance. For people with ASD, each developmental line more or less
keeps its own company and the disparate parts develop relatively independently.
More than that, different people with ASD develop in different
ways; there are many developmental trajectories or pathways that
ASD children follow as they mature and change over time. Sometimes
the music is harmonious, like Brahms, sometimes it is like modern
atonal music, all discord and harsh notes, often it is repetitive like
Philip Glass, but it is never the silence of John Cage. And each person is
his own composition, with his own rhythm and pace, volume and pitch.
I remember experiencing this incongruity or asynchrony most vividly
when I went to a re-release of Star Wars with my children. In the
row behind us, a group of distinguished-looking gentlemen sat, well
dressed and composed. Most had silver hair or were balding and were
attired casually in golf shirts and well-pressed pants. They were not eating
popcorn like the rest of us but were quietly talking to each other.
For all the world they looked like a group of men in their fifties and sixties,
out to enjoy a kids’ movie. Perhaps they were like Trekkies, adults
who had made Star Wars the center of an interest group. Perhaps they
were amateur film critics who like to go to the movies, and afterward,
over a cappuccino or two, discuss the cultural implications of Star Wars
and its derivation from Western civilization’s archetypal myths.
Then the movie started. They began whooping and hollering like
the rest of us. All of a sudden I realized they were probably residents of