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Missing The Mystery
May. 2nd, 2007 11:08 pmMar 2007
Soldier of Sidon - Gene Wolfe - Tor Books, 2006
* * *
For me, a working memory is an absolutely essential requirement for our humanity. Without it we lose fundamental parts of our personality - our knowledge of our relationships, our personal history, our characteristic opinions. All that is left is our physical body and instinctive responses, a human shell. Alzheimers, CJD and other forms of dementia are in my opinion the worst way to die and I am deeply grateful that none of my friends or relatives has so far suffered from them. It is also why, with regret, I cannot take the idea of an afterlife seriously. The evidence that memory is a consequence solely of neuronal physical structure and chemical activity is overwhelming and grows with every new case of dementia, head trauma or stroke. I can conceive of some aspect of me continuing after death, but without memory, my shade would not, in any meaningful way, be me.
Which perhaps explains why I find Latro, the hero of the classically-set Soldier in the Mist series, the most sympathetic and tragic of Wolfe’s characters. He suffers from a head wound which has left him unable to form long-term memories, with the result that he can only remember events that have happened in the last day or so (this is medically accurate - there is a process called Long Term Potentiation that converts short-term memories into long-term ones, and which can be disrupted by damage to the brain). The texts of the books are in effect a diary that he keeps to remind himself of who he is, a task complicated by the fact that for him, gods, ghosts and demons are as real as people.
( Read more... )
Soldier of Sidon - Gene Wolfe - Tor Books, 2006
* * *
For me, a working memory is an absolutely essential requirement for our humanity. Without it we lose fundamental parts of our personality - our knowledge of our relationships, our personal history, our characteristic opinions. All that is left is our physical body and instinctive responses, a human shell. Alzheimers, CJD and other forms of dementia are in my opinion the worst way to die and I am deeply grateful that none of my friends or relatives has so far suffered from them. It is also why, with regret, I cannot take the idea of an afterlife seriously. The evidence that memory is a consequence solely of neuronal physical structure and chemical activity is overwhelming and grows with every new case of dementia, head trauma or stroke. I can conceive of some aspect of me continuing after death, but without memory, my shade would not, in any meaningful way, be me.
Which perhaps explains why I find Latro, the hero of the classically-set Soldier in the Mist series, the most sympathetic and tragic of Wolfe’s characters. He suffers from a head wound which has left him unable to form long-term memories, with the result that he can only remember events that have happened in the last day or so (this is medically accurate - there is a process called Long Term Potentiation that converts short-term memories into long-term ones, and which can be disrupted by damage to the brain). The texts of the books are in effect a diary that he keeps to remind himself of who he is, a task complicated by the fact that for him, gods, ghosts and demons are as real as people.
( Read more... )