“Even in the long dark days she spent wholly alone – in the libraries, or in her laboratory, fingers burnt from handling fatty ashes – she would hear voices just out of her hearing, or see things in her periphery that were not there. It seemed to her that sometimes her hands would grasp her own throat and press up against her windpipe until she saw spots in her vision. She would see dangling ropes; she would forget where she was and wipe out a whole morning’s scholarship with false memory.”
