Memory is the only sign of being alive

Adolphus 2022-03-26 09:01:05

"god damn it! why won't u take me seriously! I know what I'm feeling, it feels like my brain's fucking dying! and everything I've worked for in my entire life is going! All, is going.. ...."

When you can't remember the way home, can't find the toilet at home, and can't remember the names of your loved ones, does this mean that the brain is blinded?

When the world around you begins to blur, when you lose your judgment on yourself, are you still the same you?

All value judgments and life decisions come from knowledge, impressions, experiences, and feelings, all of which are memory stores of different natures.

Without memory, what is left?

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Extended Reading

Still Alice quotes

  • Lydia Howland: You can't use your situation to just get me to do everything you want me to do.

    Dr. Alice Howland: Why can't I?

    Lydia Howland: Because that's not fair.

    Dr. Alice Howland: I don't have to be fair. I'm your mother.

  • [last lines]

    Lydia Howland: [reading to her mother, but mostly from memory] "Night flight to San Francisco chase the moon across America. God, it's been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet, we'll have reached the tropopause, the great elt of calm air. As close to the ozone as I'll get, I - I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was... frightening."

    Lydia Howland: "But I saw something only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things. Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who's perished from famine, from war, from the plague... And they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling, spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great net of souls. And the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Because nothing is lost forever. In this world, there a kind of painful progress. A longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so."

    Lydia Howland: [moving over alongside her mother] Hey. Did you like that. What I jest read, did you like it?

    Dr. Alice Howland: [barely grunting]

    Lydia Howland: And what... What was it about?

    Dr. Alice Howland: Love. Yeah, love.

    Lydia Howland: Yeah, it was about love.