'Is happiness worth losing your memory?'

book review by JAY MICHAELSON here.

 

For three decades, Jonathan Cott was a successful music and cultural critic. A contributing editor to Rolling Stone since its inception, he wrote 15 books, including classic portraits of Lou Reed and John Lennon. In 1999, however, Cott underwent Electroconvulsive Therapy, or ECT—shock therapy, as it's popularly known—to treat chronic depression. The ECT helped alleviate his symptoms. But as a result of it, Cott, like me, lost his short-term memory. He also suffered retrograde amnesia and effectively forgot 15 years of his life. According to his new book, On the Sea of Memory: A Journey From Forgetting to Remembering, Cott is unable to recall anything that happened to him between 1985 and 2000. When his friends tell stories of his "lost years," he writes, "I listen to their stories with incredulity, amazement, shock, bewilderment, regret, and often with great amusement and acute embarrassment about the things that the I I am now who was the me I don't remember apparently did."

...

Being without memory is more than mere forgetfulness: It is being set adrift on an eternal present, without trajectory or history. Cott's book is subtitled "A Journey From Forgetting to Remembering," but it's not nearly so linear. The book is an odd combination of memoir, reflection, and interviews with philosophers, neurologists, and spiritual teachers. As Cott says many times, he cannot remember a paragraph once he has written it—and these lapses reveal themselves in Cott's rambling style and his penchant, in the interviews that make up the heart of the book, for consulting his notes rather than engaging in dialogue with his subjects. It's heartbreaking to see a once-gifted writer and interviewer so deserted by his craft.

 

At the same time, living without past or future has a transformative aspect. Living in the "eternal present" is, in many religious and philosophical schools of thought, a form of freedom. It's what the spiritual guru Ram Dass means by "being here now": Every moment is new.