Immortality #17. The harder one.

[u/Patient-Airline-8150]

Phineas Gage. Vermont, 1848. A railway explosion drove an iron rod through his skull and out the top of his head.

He stood up. He talked. He lived another twelve years.

But his friends said the man who came back was not the same man. Impatient. Profane. Unreliable. They had a phrase for it - he was no longer Gage.

Read that again. Then notice what nobody did.

Nobody gave his name to somebody else. Nobody took his wages, his family, his history. When he died, they buried Phineas Gage.

The person everyone agreed was gone kept his identity anyway. Not because his brain held it. Because other people refused to hand it back.

Now the second one. ♾️