Notes Towards a Most Compelling Thought

"A traveller who had seen many countries and peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere; and he answered: men are inclined to laziness. Some will feel that he might have said with greater justice: they are all timorous. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once, as something unique, and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and diffuse plurality: he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience why? From fear of his neighbour who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbour, to think and act herd-fashion, and not to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for comfort, inertia - in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveller spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everybody's bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a unique wonder; they dare to show us the human being as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull. When a great thinker despises men, it is their laziness that he despises: for it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction. The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at him: 'Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and desiring, that is not really you.'"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Challenge of Every Great Philosophy)

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. ... the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue."

(Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

"It is by History which is created, lived, and really remembered as 'tradition' that Man realized himself or 'appears' as a dialectical totality, instead of annihilating himself and 'disappearing' by 'pure' or 'abstract' negation of every given whatsoever, real or thought. It is in the lack of historical memory (or understanding) that the moral danger of Nihilism or Skepticism resides which would negate everything without preserving anything, even in the form of memory. A society that spends its time listening to the radical 'nonconformist' Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all (even the 'sublimated' given preserved in historical remembrance) solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into active anarchy and disappearing. Likewise, the Revolutionary who dreams of a 'permanent revolution' that negates every type of tradition and takes no account of concrete past, except to overcome it, necessarily ends up either in the nothingness of social anarchy or in annulling himself physically or politically. Only the Revolutionary who manages to maintain or reestablish the historical tradition, by preserving in a positive memory the given present which he himself has relegated to the past by his negation, succeeds in creating a new historical World capable of existing."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"'The truth will not run away from us' – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past that threatens to disappear with every present that does not recognize itself as meant in it."

(Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)

"It may be that continuity of tradition is mere semblance. But then precisely the persistence of this semblance of persistence provides it with continuity."

(Walter Benjamin, "Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress", The Arcades Project)

"How could something come from history? Without history, becoming would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but becoming is not historical."

"...becoming is the concept itself. It is born in History, and falls back into it, but is not of it. In itself it has neither beginning nor end but only a milieu."

"History is not experimentation, it is only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the experimentation of something that escapes history. Without history experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but experimentation is not historical. It is philosophical."

(Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?)

Welfare to Work and the Gotha Program

"Asked to name an instance in which his thinking had changed over the past 10 years, Mr. Obama cited the 1996 welfare reform bill signed by former President Clinton. He said he opposed the measure at the time because he believed it would have 'disastrous results,' denying millions of women economic support without providing them with job training, child care or health benefits. He said he now believes the law has been largely successful."
"'It worked a lot better than a lot of people anticipated,' he said. He then added, speaking more broadly, 'I am absolutely convinced that we have to have work as the centerpiece of any social policy.'"

("The Obama-McCain Faith Forum", NY Times 8/16/2008)

"In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to 'end welfare as we know it.' Despite howls of protest from some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance."

("From Welfare Shift in ’96, a Reminder for Clinton", NY Times 4/11/2008)

"The conformism which has dwelt within social democracy from the very beginning rests not merely on its political tactics, but also on its economic conceptions. ... The Gotha Program [dating from the 1875 Gotha Congress] already bore traces of this confusion. It defined labor as 'the source of all wealth and all culture'. Suspecting the worst, Marx responded that human being, who owned no other property aside from his labor-power, 'must be the slave of other human beings, who… have made themselves into property-owners.'"

(Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)

"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission."

(Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program)

"The worker appears to sell his 'labour' in exchange for a wage. The capitalist 'combines' that labour with machines, raw material and the labour of other men to produce finished products. As the capitalist owns the machines and raw material, as well as the money to pay the wages, is it no 'natural' that he should also own the finished products which result from the 'combination of these factors'?

"This is what appears to occur under capitalism. However, probing beneath the surface, Marx comes up with a series of striking observations which can only be denied if one deliberately refuses to examine the unique social conditions which create the very peculiar and exceptional 'exchange' between labour and capital. In the first place, there is an institutional inequality of conditions between the capitaists and workers. The capitalist is not forced to buy labour-power on a continuous basis. He does it only if it is profitable to him. If not, he prefers to wait, to lay off workers, or even to close his plant down till better times. The worker, on the other hand (the word is used here in the social meaning made clear precisely by this sentence, and not necessarily in the stricter sense of manual labourer), is under economic compulsion to sell his labour-power. As he has no access to the means of production, including land, as he has no access to any large-scale free stock of food, and as he has no reserves of money which enable him to survive for any length of time while doing nothing, he must sell his labour power to the capitalist on a continuous basis and at the current rate. Without such institutionalized compulsion, a fully developed capitalist society would be impossible. ... If people are living under conditions where ther is no economic compulsion to sell their labour-power, then the repressive juridical and political compulsion has to deliver the necessary manpower to the entrepreneurs; otherwise capitalism could not survive under these circumstances."

(Ernest Mandel, Introduction to Capital: Volume 1)

The future of the future is the present.

'There is a wholly unique experience of dialectic. The compelling--the drastic--experience, which refutes everything "gradual" about becoming and shows all seeming "development" to be dialectical reversal, eminently and thoroughly composed, is the awakening from a dream. ... The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as a waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass though and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!--Therefore:remembering and awakening are the most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance.'

(Walter Benjamin, excerpt from "Dream City and Dream House, Drams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung", The Arcades Project)

'Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by analyzing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appear in religious or political form. It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality. It will then become plain that our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future, but to complete the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will becomes plain that mankind does not bring about any new work, but consciously brings about the completion of its old work.'

(Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge)

all space-time in a knotshell

"Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well."

Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad."

(Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History)

"The knot is the only support conceivable for a relation between something and something else. If on the one hand the knot is abstract, it must at the same time be conceived as concrete."

(Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome)

Slavoj Žižek: Materialism and Theology

'It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.'

(Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History)

"...the relationship between historical and dialectical materialism is that of parallax; they are substantially the same, the shift from one to the other is purely a shift of perspective."

(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View)

Indeed, is not dialectical materialism essentially materialist theology, that aspect of Marx that, despite its necessity, is "small and ugly and which must be kept out of sight."

Ezra Pound's Dialectical Vortex

'When Pound abandoned Imagism, around 1914, he did so noisily, and in the name of another doctrine, which he (along with Wyndham Lewis) named Vorticism. The trope in a Vorticist poem is the Vortex—although, as Moody rightly says, a Vortex is just an Image by another name. The key notion now is energy. (Pound and Lewis had very much in mind Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism, an artistic and literary movement that had a vogue in England shortly before the war. They affected to despise Marinetti as a showman, but they were, stylistically, his imitators.) “The vortex is the point of maximum energy,” Pound explained in BLAST, the magazine that he and Lewis produced, and that ran for two issues. “All experience rushes into this vortex. . . . All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.” The cluster of associations triggered by the apparition of the faces—Odysseus’ descent into Hades, Dante’s visit to the Inferno, Persephone and Demeter—is present in the twentieth-century subway, but only for those who can see. “Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius,” Pound wrote.'

(Louis Menand, "The Pound Error" from 6/9/08 issue of The New Yorker)

"The dialectical [vortex] is a [vortex] that emerges suddenly, in a flash. What has been is to be held fast--as an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability. The rescue that is carried out by these means--and only by these--can operate solely for the sake of what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost."

(Walter Benjamin, fragment from "On the Theory of Knowledge Theory of Progress", The Arcades Project)

History...

'In the mechanical age now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern. Slow movement insured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time. We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.'

'[There is a] strange falsification of history by archeology, insofar as the survival of many material objects of the past does not indicate the quality of ordinary life and experience at any particular time. '

(Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media)

"...the movement of any archeology... is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond all play."

(Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences)

'If the film called history rewinds itself, it turns into an endless loop. What will soon end in the monopoly of bits and fiber optics began with the monopoly of writing. History was the homogenized field that, as an academic subject, only took account of literate cultures. Mouths and graphisms were relegated to prehistory. Otherwise, stories and histories (both deriving from historia) could not have been linked. All the military, religious and medical orders, judgments, announcements and prescriptions, which produced mountains of corpses, were communicated along the very same channel that monopolized the descriptions of those mountains of corpses. Which is why anything that ever happened ended up in libraries.'

'And Foucault, the last historian or first archaeologist, merely had to look things up. The suspicion that all power emanates from and returns to archives could be brilliantly confirmed, at least within the realms of law, medicine and theology. A tautology of history, or its calvary. For the libraries, in which the archaeologist found so much rich material, collected and catalogued papers that in terms of addressee, distribution technique, degree of secrecy and writing technique had been extremely diverse -- Foucault's archive as the entropy of a post office. Even writing itself, before it ends up in libraries, is a communication medium, the technology of which the archaeologist simply forgot. It is for this reason that all his analyses end immediately before that point in time at which other media penetrated the library's stacks. Discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film rolls.'

'As long as it was moving along, history was indeed Foucault's "wavelike succession of words." More simply, but no less technical than tomorrow's fiber optic cables, writing functioned as a universal medium--in times when there was no concept of medium. Whatever else was going on dropped through the filter of letters or ideograms.'

(Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter)

'The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action.'

'The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill. For this concept defines precisely the present in which he writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the “eternal” picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone. He leaves it to others to give themselves to the whore called “Once upon a time” in the bordello of historicism. He remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode the continuum of history.'

'Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus of various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millenia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records [erfasst] the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the here-and-now, in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.'

(Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History)

Heidegger/Benjamin: On Art and Capital

'Because the essence of [Capital] is nothing [Capitalistic], essential reflection upon [Capital] and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of [Capital] and, on the other, fundamentally different from it.'

'Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning.'

'Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with [Capital] we do not yet experience the coming to presence of [Capital], that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of [Capital], the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.'

(Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology)

'The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. [Capitalism] attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. [Capitalism] sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; [Capitalism] seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.'

...

'“Fiat ars – pereat mundus” [“Let art be created, though the world shall perish”], says [Capitalism], and expects [Marketing] to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own [powerlessness and incompetence] as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which [Capitalism] is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.'

(Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)

In the Age of the World Picture

"We live in a time when we have put a man made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. It is no longer the external world. It is now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist. When you've a man made environment around the planet you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to be programmed. The environment is not visible. It's information."

(Marshall McLuhan)

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"When, accordingly, the picture character of the world is made clear as the representedness of that which is, then in order fully to grasp the modern essence of representedness we must track out and expose the original naming power of the worn-out word and concept “to represent” [voorstellen]: to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself. Through this, whatever is comes to a stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being. That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man’s becoming subject in the midst of that which is.

"Only because and insofar as man actually and essentially has become subject is it necessary for him, as a consequence, to confront the explicit question: Is it as an “I” confined to its own preferences and freed into its own arbitrary choosing or as the “we” of society; is it as an individual or as a community; is it as a personality within the community or as a mere group member in the corporate body; is it as a state and nation and as a people or as the common humanity of modern man, that man will and ought to be the subject that in his modern essence he already is? Only where man is essentially already subject does there exist the possibility of his slipping into the aberration of subjectivism in the sense of individualism. But also, only where man remains subject does the positive struggle against individualism and for the community as the sphere of those goals that govern all achievement and usefulness have any meaning.

"The interweaving of these two events, which for the modern age is decisive - that the world is transformed into picture and man into subject - throws light at the same time on the grounding event of modern history, an event that at first glance seems almost absurd. Namely, the more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man’s disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does the subject rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man...

"As soon as the world becomes picture, the position of man is conceived as a world view. To be sure, the phrase “world view” is open to misunderstanding, as though it were merely a matter here of a passive contemplation of the world. For this reason, already in the nineteenth century it was emphasized with justification that “world view” also meant and even meant primarily “view of life.” The fact that, despite this, the phrase “world view” asserts itself as the name for the position of man in the midst of all that is, is proof of how decisively the world became picture as soon as man brought his life as subject into precedence over other centers of relationship. This means: whatever is, is considered to be in being only to the degree and to the extent that it is taken into and referred back to this life, i.e., is lived out, and becomes life-experience."

(Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture)

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"During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century, with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However far-reaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times. They did not attempt – and, perhaps, saw no way – to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.

"The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception."

(Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)

Technique of the Dialectician

"The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash. What has been is to be held fast--as an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability. The rescue that is carried out by these means--and only by these--can operate solely for the sake of what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost."

"What matters for the dialectician is to have the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking means for him: setting the sails. What is important is how they are set. Words are his sails. The way they are set makes them into concepts."

(Walter Benjamin, fragments from "On the Theory of Knowledge Theory of Progress", The Arcades Project)

Walter Benjamin: On the Weather

"The mere narcotizing effect which cosmic forces have on a shallow and brittle personality is attested in the relation of such a person to one of the highest and most general manifestations of these forces: the weather. Nothing is more characteristic than that precisely this most intimate and mysterious affair, the working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos. Hence for him the deepest connection between weather and boredom. How fine the ironic overcoming of this attitude in the story of the splenetic Englishman who wakes up one morning and shoots himself because it is raining. Or Goethe: how he managed to illuminate the weather in his meteorological studies, so that one is attempted to say he undertook this work solely in order to be able to integrate even the weather into his waking, creative life."

(Walter Benjamin, excerpt from "Boredom, Eternal Return", The Arcades Project)

Notes on my generation

"A generation that has lost all bodily and natural aids to remembrance, and that , poorer than before, was left to itself to take possession of childhood in merely an isolated, scattered, and pathological way."

"The child, in fact, can do what the grown up cannot, recognize the new once again."

(Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project)

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"His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried to imagine how it was for him. . . Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible."

"It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before. . . . 'I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything,' he would say. 'It’s like being dead.'"

"...holding something in the palm of one hand, and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand as if he were a magician practising a disappearing trick. He was holding a chocolate. He could feel the chocolate unmoving in his left palm, and yet every time he lifted his hand he told me it revealed a brand new chocolate."

"To imagine the future was no more possible for Clive than to remember the past—both were engulfed by the onslaught of amnesia. Yet, at some level, Clive could not be unaware of the sort of place he was in, and the likelihood that he would spend the rest of his life, his endless night, in such a place."

"Clive’s scripts were repeated with great frequency, sometimes three or four times in one phone call. He stuck to subjects he felt he knew something about, where he would be on safe ground, even if here and there something apocryphal crept in. . . . These small areas of repartee acted as stepping stones on which he could move through the present. They enabled him to engage with others."

"I would put it even more strongly and use a phrase that Deborah used in another connection, when she wrote of Clive being poised upon 'a tiny platform . . . above the abyss.' Clive’s loquacity, his almost compulsive need to talk and keep conversations going, served to maintain a precarious platform, and when he came to a stop the abyss was there, waiting to engulf him. This, indeed, is what happened when we went to a supermarket and he and I got separated briefly from Deborah. He suddenly exclaimed, 'I’m conscious now . . . . Never saw a human being before . . . for thirty years . . . . It’s like death!' He looked very angry and distressed. Deborah said the staff calls these grim monologues his 'deads'—they make a note of how many he has in a day or a week and gauge his state of mind by their number."

"Back in his room, I spotted the two volumes of Bach’s 'Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues' on top of the piano and asked Clive if he would play one of them. He said that he had never played any of them before, but then he began to play Prelude 9 in E Major and said, 'I remember this one.' He remembers almost nothing unless he is actually doing it; then it may come to him. He inserted a tiny, charming improvisation at one point, and did a sort of Chico Marx ending, with a huge downward scale. With his great musicality and his playfulness, he can easily improvise, joke, play with any piece of music."

"Semantic memory is not of much use in the absence of explicit, episodic memory."

"The amnesic patient can think about material in the immediate present. . . . He can also think about items in his semantic memory, his general knowledge. . . . But thinking for successful everyday adaptation requires not only factual knowledge, but the ability to recall it on the right occasion, to relate it to other occasions, indeed the ability to reminisce."

"The neuroscientist Neal J. Cohen recounts the famous story of Édouard Claparède, a Swiss physician who, upon shaking hands with a severely amnesic woman,pricked her finger with a pin hidden in his hand. Subsequently, whenever he again attempted to shake the patient’s hand, she promptly withdrew it. When he questioned her about this behavior, she replied, 'Isn’t it allowed to withdraw one’s hand?' and 'Perhaps there is a pin hidden in your hand,' and finally, “Sometimes pins are hidden in hands.' Thus the patient learned the appropriate response based on previous experience, but she never seemed to attribute her behavior to the personal memory of some previously experienced event. "

"He can shave, shower, look after his grooming, and dress elegantly, with taste and style; he moves confidently and is fond of dancing. He talks abundantly, using a large vocabulary; he can read and write in several languages. He is good at calculation. He can make phone calls, and he can find the coffee things and find his way about the home. If he is asked how to do these things, he cannot say, but he does them. Whatever involves a sequence or pattern of action, he does fluently, unhesitatingly."

"Without intact explicit memory, Jascha Heifetz would not remember from day to day which piece he had chosen to work on previously, or that he had ever worked on that piece before. Nor would he recall what he had accomplished the day before or by analysis of past experience what particular problems in execution should be a focus of today’s practice session. In fact, it would not occur to him to have a practice session at all; without close direction from someone else he would be effectively incapable of undertaking the process of learning any new piece, irrespective of his considerable technical skills."

"No one remembers, word for word, all that was said in any lecture, or played in any piece. But if you understood it once, you now own new networks of knowledge, about each theme and how it changes and relates to others. Thus, no one could remember Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony entire, from a single hearing. But neither could one ever hear again those first four notes as just four notes! Once but a tiny scrap of sound; it is now a Known Thing—a locus in the web of all the other things we know, whose meanings and significances depend on one another."

"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."

"The hearing of a melody is a hearing with the melody. . . . It is even a condition of hearing melody that the tone present at the moment should fill consciousness entirely, that nothing should be remembered, nothing except it or beside it be present in consciousness. . . . Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. . . . Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown."

"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 ... And yet one has only to see him at the keyboard or with Deborah to feel that, at such times, he is himself again and wholly alive. It is not the remembrance of things past, the 'once' that Clive yearns for, or can ever achieve. It is the claiming, the filling, of the present, the now, and this is only possible when he is totally immersed in the successive moments of an act. It is the 'now' that bridges the abyss."

(Selections from "The Abyss" by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker Magazine 9/24/2007)

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"What we call 'understanding a sentence' has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think."

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)