Poemranker [Replying] Sun May 05 22:34:10 PDT 2024

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He stooped to smell a rose, the same heâd smelled all morning. Inner child not inner any more, he tasted everything newâ delicious oblivion. Eternal pasteless now.

zodiac

5-Jan-06/9:26 AM

David Shenk, who is comfortably under fifty, makes the case in "The Forgetting" that a cure for senile dementia might not be an unmitigated blessing. He notes, for example, that one striking peculiarity of the disease is that its sufferers often suffer less and less as it progresses. Caring for an Alzheimer's patient is gruellingly repetitious precisely because the patient himself has lost the cerebral equipment to experience anything as a repetition. Shenk quotes patients who speak of "something delicious in oblivion" and who report an enhancement of their sensory pleasures as they come to dwell in an eternal, pastless Now. If your short-term memory is shot, you don't remember, as you stoop to smell a rose, that you've been stooping to smell the same rose all morning.

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/010910fa_FACT1

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