The man who mistook his wife for a hat by Oliver Sacks, Оливер Сакс

both the means and the motive to make a facade. His memory deficits are organic and permanent and incorrigible, though it is puzzling they should go back so long.' Since, she felt, he was 'unconcerned . . . manifested no special anxiety . . . constituted no management problem,' there was nothing she could offer, or any therapeutic 'entrance' or 'lever' she could see.
       At this point, persuaded that this was, indeed, 'pure' Korsakov's, uncomplicated by other factors, emotional or organic, I wrote to Luria and asked his opinion. He spoke in his reply of his patient Bel,* whose amnesia had retroactively eradicated ten years. He said he saw no reason why such a retrograde amnesia should not thrust backward decades, or almost a whole lifetime. 'I can only wait for the final amnesia,' Buriuel writes, 'the one that can erase an entire life.' But Jimmies amnesia, for whatever reason, had erased memory and time back to 1945-roughly-and then stopped. Occasionally, he would recall something much later, but the recall was fragmentary and dislocated in time. Once, seeing the word 'satellite' in a newspaper headline, he said offhandedly that he'd been involved in a project of satellite tracking while on the ship Chesapeake Bay, a memory fragment coming from the early or mid-Sixties. But, for all practical purposes, his cut-off point was during the mid- (or late) Forties, and anything subsequently re-
       *See A.R. Luria, The Neuropsychology of Memory (1976), pp. 250-2.
       trieved was fragmentary, unconnected. I his was the case in 1975, and it is still the case now, nine years later.
       What could we do? What should we do? There are no prescriptions,' Luria wrote, 'in a case like this. Do whatever your ingenuity and your heart suggest. There is little or no hope of any recovery in his memory. But a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being-matters of which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of an impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to touch him, and change him. And the circumstances of your work especially allow this, for you work in a Home, which is like a little world, quite different from the clinics and institutions where I work. Neuropsychological!}', there is little or nothing you can do; but in the realm of the Individual, there may be much you can do.'
       Luria mentioned his patient Kur as manifesting a rare self-awareness, in which hopelessness was mixed with an odd equanimity. 'I have no memory of the present,' Kur would say. 'I do not know what I have just done or from where I have just come … I can recall my past very well, but I have no memory of my present.' When asked whether he had ever seen the person testing him, he said, 'I cannot say yes or no, I can neither affirm nor deny that I have seen you.' This was sometimes the case with Jimmie; and, like Kur, who stayed many months in the same hospital, Jimmie began to form 'a sense of familiarity'; he slowly learned his way around the home-the whereabouts of the dining room, his own room, the elevators, the stairs, and in some sense recognised some of the staff, although he confused them, and perhaps had to do so, with people from the past. He soon became fond of the nursing sister in the Home; he recognised her voice, her footfalls, immediately, but would always say that she had been a fellow pupil at his high school, and was greatly surprised when I addressed her as 'Sister'.
       'Gee!' he exclaimed, 'the damnedest things happen. I'd never have guessed you'd become a religious, Sister!'
       Since he's been at our Home-that is, since early 1975-Jimmie has never been able to identify anyone in it consistently. The
       only person he truly recognises is his brother, whenever he visits from Oregon. These meetings are deeply emotional and moving to observe-the only truly emotional meetings Jimmie has. He loves his brother, he recognises him, but he cannot understand