What survives memory loss?
Palaces with walls missing. A mask, a hole in the hours. A bird’s cache.
Philosophy
A bishop walks the inner rooms of his own mind and cannot find their floor.
The Palaces of Memory
Hippo Regius · c. 397–400
Science
When the Lights Go Out
A person counts backward, the room continues, and later there is a hole in the life where the cutting was.
Operating theaters everywhere · 1846 to now
Animals
The Thief Who Remembers Being a Thief
A bird hides food, watches who is watching, and later recaches, as if it knows what another mind might do.
Western oak woodlands, and Cambridge aviaries · 1990s–2000s
Sacred Traditions
A sixteen-year-old lies down as if dead, and a question becomes a life.
Who Is Asking?
Madurai, then Arunachala · 1896
Science
The Conviction of Its Existence
A Civil War physician finds that men who have lost an arm still itch in a hand that is not there. He has to invent a word, and then a fiction, to be believed.
Turner’s Lane Hospital, Philadelphia · 1864–1872
Science
A Memory That Would Not Thin
In Moscow a psychologist follows a man who cannot forget a list. The gift is also a clogging. Ordinary forgetting, it turns out, is a kind of mercy.
Moscow · 1920s–1968
Ordinary Life
Marigold, water, salt, bread, a photograph. A night in Mexico when the dead are fed. Memory here is a table, not a test.
A Place Set for the Living Who Were
Mexico, in homes and cemeteries · 1–2 November, as practiced