The New Yorker recently published an article by Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist and author, with an update on an equally famous patient: Clive Wearing [1], a British musician who suffered an attack of viral encephalitis in 1985. Although Wearing recovered, the infection destroyed the areas of his brain associated with storing memories. As a result, for the last 22 years, Wearing has been living in an eerie, amnesiac void – unable to make any new memories, unable to remember anything beyond a few moments ago.
Sacks gives us a startling glimpse of Clive Wearing’s effort to comprehend his condition – which, of course, he cannot learn the truth about any more than he can learn any other new information. At times he seems aware that something is dreadfully wrong, but he can never tell what it is. So severe is his amnesia that he continually believes he has only just awakened after being unconscious for an extended period:
Desperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase, Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook. 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 cancelled 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.
What I found most amazing is that Deborah, Clive’s wife, has stayed by his side despite his incurable memory loss. The love and devotion she’s showed to her husband in the face of their 22-year ordeal beggars belief; if there are such things as saints, she is surely among them. As she wrote:
“Clive was constantly surrounded by strangers in a strange place, with no knowledge of where he was or what had happened to him. To catch sight of me was always a massive relief—to know that he was not alone, that I still cared, that I loved him, that I was there. Clive was terrified all the time. But I was his life, I was his lifeline. Every time he saw me, he would run to me, fall on me, sobbing, clinging.”
Notwithstanding his wife’s devotion, Clive Wearing does have one other “lifeline” – his musical skill, which was not taken from him by his illness. Dr. Sacks notes that only when playing does Clive seem truly in the present:
Clive’s performance self seems, to those who know him, just as vivid and complete as it was before his illness. This mode of being, this self, is seemingly untouched by his amnesia, even though his autobiographical self, the self that depends on explicit, episodic memories, is virtually lost.
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