To all good Buddhists The Abyss: Memory and Amnesia

(via lastchatwithphontaine)

ontheborderland:

This New Yorker article from 2007 is endlessly horrifying and fascinating to me. The subject, Clive Wearing, has absolutely no memory. He lost his ability to form new memories and also suffered retrograde amnesia due to a brain infection. As far as he is concerned, he has no past and no way to move into the future. He only lives in the present, for two or three seconds at a time. He tried to keep a journal, as a way to document and affirm his very existence, but:

…his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake… . 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake… . 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was canceled out by the next entry. This dreadful journal, almost void of any other content but these passionate assertions and denials, intending to affirm existence and continuity but forever contradicting them, was filled anew each day, and soon mounted to hundreds of almost identical pages.

Utterly agonizing and disturbing, and he described it as being dead. In his mind, there was no evidence for him having lived at all before. The only remedy for the transience and impermanence of life is our own memory of past events. However, Mr. Wearing is forced to live only in the actual moment, over and over. He is about as unattached to life as someone can be; he literally embodies the cliché of “living in the moment”. He doesn’t take anyone, anyplace, anything for granted. He can’t have an ego.

It’s a lot to think about.