How Did a Stroke Change the Way Robert Greene Sees the World?

Robert Greene says his stroke made him more emotional and less able to control the feeling. He would start crying without knowing why, then feel a wave of ecstasy and wonder why it was happening. He looked into it and says a stroke affecting the right side of the brain often does that. He treats the left side as language, logic, and reasoning, and the right as more holistic and emotional. He calls the left-right split full of cliches and says Andrew Huberman would know more of the science. The account is his experience of his own stroke.

Other people still in wheelchairs made him feel their helplessness, and he almost cried. He quotes the poet John Keats on a life of sensations instead of thoughts. Feeling became a way of thinking. The sublime stopped being an intellectual subject, as it would have been 20 years earlier, and became a feeling inside him. A story that felt too intellectual did not work. He thinks the stroke let out things he used to edit away.

He says it will sound strange, but the stroke felt as if it happened for a purpose. Seen as a curse, it would leave him bitter. Seen as a blessing, he had to find the sublime in the smallest details. Readers will not trek the Gobi Desert or swim with dolphins. Everyone lives in a house or a room and feels constricted. He is describing how he chose to take his own illness, not telling anyone else how to take theirs.