978-1572305441

172 A MIND APART
He gets such enjoyment from a wind like this. It gives him an opportunity
to fly that kite way up in the sky, plunging and sailing with what
looks like wild abandon. It’s gratifying to see him now, so much happier
at school. The school appreciates his talents, ignores his eccentricities
that are irksome, and in general accommodates but, at the same time,
challenges him. Heather, too, finally has found a school environment
that appreciates her talents, and she is now enjoying that walk to school
in the morning. These developments contrast starkly with those dark
days when going to school was a little hell both for them and for their
parents, when they were at odds with the institution of school, when
there was no understanding of ASD, when there was no accommodation
to their talents and eccentricities.
* * *
There is a remarkable short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean
writer, that perfectly illustrates what happens when there is no
accommodation to a child’s difficulties. The story is called “Funes, the
Memorious,” about a young man with a prodigious memory who can
forget nothing. He remembers every detail of his life in the particulars
and is completely absorbed in his contemplation of the visible world.
He is acutely aware of the uniqueness of everything he sees and so cannot
categorize or generalize; a dog seen at one time of the day is not the
same dog seen a minute later. And, in fact, he is right, as the pre-
Socratics would have said. His learning style lacks organizational strategies,
lacks the ability to use contextual cues to categorize and apply one
concept to several situations. Funes’s memory challenges our conventional
notion of what is unique and what is different, what is the same
and what is a repetition. But it comes at a cost, obviously, and that is the
difficulty in learning and thinking: “To think is to forget a difference, to
generalize, to abstract,” writes Borges. And because Funes could not
forget, he could not generalize. The narrator of the story is profoundly
affected by his night of conversation with Funes: “It occurred to me that
each one of my words (each one of my gestures) would live on in his
implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying superfluous
gestures.” Funes is paralyzed by the multiplicity of superfluous
gestures that infect his memory, and his cognitive system quickly becomes
overloaded as he remembers everything and forgets nothing, just
like the child with ASD.
This short story captures very nicely the inner world of children