With a sister whose brain has been damaged by encephalitis leaving her without a short term memory, I was especially interested in this piece by Oliver Sachs in The New Yorker, A Neurologist's Notebook: The Abyss
Clive Wearing, an eminent British musicologist, struck with encephalitis, loses his ability to preserve new memories as well as the loss of his entire past - the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded.
From the start, he has been loved by his wife Deborah and he's retained his musical powers and memory.
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. The rope that is let down from Heaven for Clive comes not with recalling the past, as for Proust, but with performance—and it holds only as long as the performance lasts. Without performance, the thread is broken, and he is thrown back once again into the abyss
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It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is wholly in the present
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As Deborah recently wrote to me, “Clive’s at-homeness in music and in his love for me are where he transcends amnesia and finds continuum—not the linear fusion of moment after moment, nor based on any framework of autobiographical information, but where Clive, and any of us, are finally, where we are who we are.” ♦