What he was teaching himself instead was a gradual recognition of these new nonarm objects. He began to understand what the weight of a wooden log was like. What he imaged a mechanized beast of wood and rusting metal bits could sense about the world around them. He began to feel into these new interchangeable limbs, not as ways of forgetting the original now absent one, but as sundered parts of the other beings they implied. He was thinking himself into an automaton. He thought what it would be to think himself into a beast. He wondered whether someday in his search he would be offered the arm of some chimpanzee--or leg or tail for how well he heard they were capable of controlling them as well--and he wondered if he would be willing to take it. If he would be willing to assume the responsibility of knowing what controlling an animal arm would be like. He thought he wouldn't. He didn't even want to consider what housing another person's arm would do.
There was a point early on, with the war still on and the tumult that entails, when he sought after any sort of replacement he could find. Usually this meant more or less articulate wooden limbs down to something that was nearly just a narrow stump with a leather strop to attach it to his chest. Some of the fancy machinations boasted full digital articulation with various claps, levers and springs. They went as far as attempting to improve on the human arm, giving each finger or pair of them a distinct feature, much like a Swiss officer's Offiziersmesser. What he hoped and continually failed to find was something that would serve as a map for his mind to reconnect arm now absent to faux arm now at least partially taking its place. He hoped each new joint would be the one that was enough for his brian to believe there was a limb in the place of absence. When in fact that problem was precisely that his mind refused to forget the very precise motions of his former limb. Individual hair follicles wouldn't have been enough to take the place of that sensation. Slight breezes made themselves perceptible to his mind despite the absent limb.