5/22/2023 0 Comments The lost mariner oliver sacks![]() ![]() ![]() Jimmie was a fine-looking man, with a curly bush of grey hair, a healthy and handsome forty-nine-year-old. It immediately made me think of a patient of mine in whom these questions are precisely exemplified: charming, intelligent, memoryless Jimmie G., who was admitted to our Home for the Aged near New York City early in 1975, with a cryptic transfer note saying, ‘Helpless, demented, confused and disoriented.’ This moving and frightening segment in Buñuel’s recently translated memoirs raises fundamental questions – clinical, practical, existential, philosophical: what sort of a life (if any), what sort of a world, what sort of a self, can be preserved in a man who has lost the greater part of his memory and, with this, his past, and his moorings in time? (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. ![]()
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