![]() Clive’s journal captures his fleeting, ungraspable place in life. Indeed, the life of this English musician and conductor had been changed forever. Sacks writes of Clive’s initial deep confusion with his-“he was acutely, continually, agonizingly, conscious that something bizarre, something awful, was the matter”-and transitions to Clive’s subsequent agony and depression. ![]() In Sacks’ typical approach, the article is written as part personal narrative, part exceptionally accessible neuroscience. ![]() In 2007 Sacks wrote an article about Clive titled “The Abyss – Music and Amnesia” for The New Yorker. I first read about Clive last week when we dove into the literature of Oliver Sacks – a famous British neurologist, naturalist, and author. In 1985 while he was in his mid-forties, Clive Wearing was diagnosed with herpes encephalitis and it was determined that the disease had also wiped his memory and his ability to create new memories. Well, yes way…for Clive Wearing at least. No life beyond the span of a few seconds? No retention of the past? No way. There is no retention of what you said, heard, or felt, and there isn’t even a remembrance that you were ever alive before. The next moment, however, all that you have just experienced is gone. One moment you feel alive and in the present you can see and hear and touch and feel. Imagine only living for a couple of seconds at a time.
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