“A sparrow without a garden”
Dr. Grene, expounds, “But as time goes on, as I am slowly like everyone else worn out, finding a tatter here and a tear there in the cloth of myself, I need this place more and more. The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work. Maybe I should be more frustrated by the obvious cul-de-sac nature of psychiatry, the horrible depreciation in the states of those that linger here, the impossibility of it all. But God help me, I am not. In a few years I will reach retirement age, and what then? I will be like a sparrow without a garden.”
The allegorical sparrow accentuates the materiality of the hospital in Dr. Grene’s existence. He is hooked to work that he would not visualize how his being after retirement would be because it would mean that he will terminate coming to the mental hospital. Without the job, survival would be difficult in the same way it would be for a sparrow missing a garden.
‘Foreign Countries’
Dr. Grene describes his relationship with his wife as “two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic. There is an underlying sense of rumour, of judgement, of memory, like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation. We are a statelet of the Baltics. Except, blast her, she has never done anything to me. It is atrocity all one way.” Although they reside in the same abode, they are emotionally detached. Dr. Grene’s portrayal of his marriage paints the imagery of a fragmented matrimony which is founded on cordiality instead of romance and love. The distance between them is categorically inhibiting the thriving of bliss and harmony.
Inmates
Dr. Grene writes, “For inmates I should write patients. But as the place was constructed in the late eighteenth century as a charitable institution for the ‘healthful asylum and superior correction of wounded seats of thought’ the word inmate does always spring to mind.” The emblematic ‘inmates’ endorses that the patients at the hospital are comparable to incarcerated inmates; hence, their movements are delimited and monitored. The extremity of mental illness makes it precarious to handle them casually, like patients not weathering mental ailments.
