“Contact” I took this photograph at Belluno Railway Station, in September 2002. I was thinking about all the points in common between Sacks’ cases. Underground points of contact though, because they did not concern the exterior aspects of deficit and excess not their causes but instead the only ways of getting out, the only possible cure. In “The lost mariner” the patient finds peace, self-awareness and serenity escaping from the mnemonic weakness of his existence relying exclusively on religious services and gardening: in “A walking Grove” only singing and music free the patient from the oppression of his frightening memory (an opposite to “The Lost mariner”); in “Homicide” it is again the quiet care of a garden that helps to forget horror, in “The disembodied lady” it is the building of actions with sight and mind that impose a beginning and end to movements that make it possible, in “The man who mistook his wife for a hat” it is music again that gives the possibility of an acceptable existence. Music is a place. Fragmented it means nothing. When we listen we link each note to the following one within a development that has a beginning and an end. The “basso continuo” of our attention, of our emotion, puts incoherent sounds, present for just a moment, together in a desire for order. Sack’s patient, some more and some less, have no future; they live in an absolutely helpless present, they are travellers numbly waiting at a station where there are no timetables, arrivals, departures, no destinations where everything happens simultaneously but yet has never happened. I exposed the upper part of the image first so that the reflection would make the time as illegible as possible then impressed the lower part of the negative with repeated shots of rails and platform shelters from other stations.