You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all… Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing… (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother's…)


Luis Buñuel Portolés (1900 – 1983) was a Spanish filmmaker who worked mainly in Mexico and France, but also in his native country and the United States. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. 1998. (Originally 1970) p.23 - 2:The Lost Mariner. This moving and frightening segment in Buñuel's recently translated memoirs raises fundamental questions - clinical, practical, existential, philosophical: what sort of a life (if any), what sort of a world, what sort of a self, can be preserved in a man who has lost the greater part of his momory and, with this, his past, and his moorings in time? - Dr. Oliver Sacks