Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks

Author:Oliver Sacks [Sacks, Oliver]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307267917
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 2008-09-04T04:00:00+00:00


Part III

Memory, Movement, and Music

15

In the Moment: Music and Amnesia

You are the music while the music lasts.

— T. S. ELIOT, The Four Quartets

In January 1985, his wife records, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was reading “The Lost Mariner,” a piece I had written about a patient with severe amnesia. My patient, Jimmie, I wrote, was “isolated in a single moment of being, with a moat or lacuna of forgetting all round him…. He is a man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.”1

“Clive and I,” Deborah Wearing wrote in her memoir, Forever Today, “could not get this story out of our heads and talked about it for days.” They had no way of knowing that they were, as Deborah put it, “staring into a mirror of our own future.”

Two months later, Clive himself was struck by a devastating brain infection, a herpes encephalitis, affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory; and he was left in a state far worse even than that of the patient I had described. Jimmie had a memory span of about half a minute; with Clive, it was only a few seconds. New events and experiences were effaced almost instantly, as Deborah wrote:

His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried to imagine how it was for him…. Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible.



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