Forever Today: A Memoir Of Love And Amnesia

Product Information

Then there’s the Met Gala, which alone has boasted countless A-List celebrities wearing bold, body-celebrating dresses on its red carpet. Over the years, we’ve seen Bella Hadid bare all in 2017 wearing Alexander Wang, and Kendall Jenner in a revealing La Perla design the same year – and who could forget Beyoncé’s sheer Givenchy gown from 2015 with its strategically placed crystals? Fast forward to the 2021, 2022 and 2023 Met Galas and stars such as Zoë Kravitz, Olivia Rodrigo, Precious Lee, Karlie Kloss and Imaan Hammam all opted for barely-there styles. Meanwhile, the likes of Daisy Edgar-Jones, Ashley Graham and Emily Ratajkowski continued the trend at the Oscars and the Cannes Film Festival. Furthermore, if we characterize these loves in terms of rights: benevolence as defending the enjoyment of intrinsic rights, attraction as recognizing intrinsic worth, and attachment as bestowing worth transitively (which I will elaborate on shortly), then covenant is about creating rights. A covenant love bestows worth on the beloved by conferring rights to her. If you have entered into a covenant, then you are obligated to fulfill the promises of that covenant. Together, these characteristics differentiate covenant love from all three of Wolterstorff’s categories – enough to warrant its own classification.

Wearing, Deborah (12 January 2005). "The man who keeps falling in love with his wife". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 5 December 2008. I realised that we are not just brain and processes. Clive had lost all that and yet he was still Clive. Even when we didn't see one another, when we were six months apart and only spoke on the telephone, nothing had changed. Even when he was at his worst, most acute state, he still had that huge overwhelming love ... for me. That was what survived when everything else was taken away.' When I asked Deborah whether Clive knew about her memoir, she told me that she had shown it to him twice before, but that he had instantly forgotten. I had my own heavily annotated copy with me, and asked Deborah to show it to him again. He said to her, “My darling, these will be the golden years of our marriage” And of course she asked, “Why would you say that?” P2: Every human being has the honor of being chosen by God as someone with whom God wants to be friends.I take it for granted that at least some benevolence and attraction are present in Deborah’s love, but attachment love is our most likely candidate for a category that would be able to fully explain the kind of love that binds itself to the beloved even at great cost to one’s own flourishing. Wolterstorff provides a helpful explication of attachment love. He writes: Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex In spite of his complex amnesia, Clive still has some types of memories that remain intact, including semantic and procedural memory. Clive Wearing’s Semantic and Procedural Memories A piece of music will draw one in, teach one about its structure and secrets, whether one is listening consciously or not. This is so even if one has never heard a piece of music before. Listening to music is not a passive process but intensely active, involving a stream of inferences, hypotheses, expectations, and anticipations. We can grasp a new piece—how it is constructed, where it is going, what will come next—with such accuracy that even after a few bars we may be able to hum or sing along with it. Such anticipation, such singing along, is possible because one has knowledge, largely implicit, of musical “rules” (how a cadence must resolve, for instance) and a familiarity with particular musical conventions (the form of a sonata, or the repetition of a theme). When we “remember” a melody, it plays in our mind; it becomes newly alive. Can dementia so thoroughly change a person’s identity that they become an entirely different person, or no person at all? And how might the implications of covenant love help us evaluate the rationality of this fear?

I have argued that Wolterstorff’s three categories of love do not adequately account for the full range of human loves, especially the kind of love that outlasts dementia. Digging deeper, I examined what that defining feature of marriage is that makes it so difficult to categorize. I found that the feature in question was a voluntary but binding agreement engendered by the promises of the initial vows. With the help of Wolterstorff’s theistic account of human dignity, I argued for the existence of a fourth category: covenant love: the orientation towards the good which seeks to fulfill the obligations generated by a voluntary promise of future love for one’s beloved. I noted that such covenantal obligations creates rights for its participants – ones who did not formerly possess them. This fourth category models Divine Love in conferring rights upon those who do not intrinsically possess them. If I am right, the fear of losing personhood in the midst of dementia is mitigated by the conclusion that my self-hood and my rights do not depend on my (or other person’s) awareness of them.

What is Dragon's Den?

Clive Wearing , a former musician for the BBC, is now the most famous amnesia patient in the world. In 1985, Clive suffered a severe fever that gave him both anterograde and retrograde amnesia. That means he can neither form new memories, nor recall most of his previous life. Instead, he lives his life thirty seconds at a time. they shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul. But can Clive’s beautiful playing and singing, his masterly conducting, his powers of improvisation be adequately characterized as “skills” or “procedures”? For his playing is infused with intelligence and feeling, with a sensitive attunement to the musical structure, the composer’s style and mind. Can any artistic or creative performance of this calibre be adequately explained by “procedural memory”? Episodic or explicit memory, we know, develops relatively late in childhood and is dependent on a complex brain system involving the hippocampi and medial temporal-lobe structures, the system that is compromised in severe amnesiacs and all but obliterated in Clive. The basis of procedural or implicit memory is less easy to define, but it certainly involves larger and more primitive parts of the brain—subcortical structures like the basal ganglia and cerebellum and their many connections to each other and to the cerebral cortex. The size and variety of these systems guarantee the robustness of procedural memory and the fact that, unlike episodic memory, procedural memory can remain largely intact even in the face of extensive damage to the hippocampi and medial temporal-lobe structures.