Without Remembrance of Things Past

I've finally been able to dig into to The New Yorker - My God, that magazine piles up week after week and before you know it, you've got a mountain of them sitting next to the sofa. Well, I'm reading this week's issue and I come across the most fascinating article by Oliver Sacks about a gentleman, Clive Wearing, who suffers from the worst case of amnesia ever recorded. His amnesia is so profound that he has no short term or long term memory; he is plagued by moments where he is thinks he is experiencing everything for the first time. He describes it as being dead and waking up. He keeps piles of journals that are filled with these same lapses and contradictions.

Clive was struck by an brain illness that wiped out critical structures in the brain that retain episodic memory. However, he still has what is called procedural memory; he is a musician and musicologist and is able to play songs he says he has never learned before. He also is still very much in love with his wife, although he can't describe her appearance if she is not in front of him and has no recollection of their years together. It's as if the impression of their relationship has been imprinted on some other part of his brain - he instinctively knows her.

I spent much of the article feeling a deep sadness for Clive and his wife - it struck me as an awful disability since he has been twice robbed - not only of his past (as he knew it), but also of the ability to create a new past. Every day is terribly new. And yet, Clive carries on and finds moments of happiness.