One More Metaphor

Love is...
One of my favorite books is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks. In it, there is the true story of Clive Wearing, a man with severe amnesia and brain damage. He has no memory of his past and has a short-term memory of only 7 seconds.

Yet he has retained his ability to read music, play piano, and even conduct a choir. A man you can hardly have a conversation with is able to perform long pieces of music perfectly.

From the book:

"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 entirely in the present."

Clive has only two sources of continuity in his life: his love for music and his love for Deborah, his wife.

"In some ways, he is not anywhere at all; he has dropped out of space and time altogether. He no longer has any inner narrative; he is not leading a life in the sense that the rest of us do. And yet one has only to see him at the keyboard or with Deborah to feel that, a such times, he is himself again and wholly alive."