Still Alice

One step further down on the ladder to self-oblivion is depersonalization—losing your sense of yourself.

We have never before suspected that memory loss could be fatal. Or at least I never suspected it. I’ve always taken it as more of a metaphor. A person suddenly realizes how much memory they are carrying around in their body, wittingly and unwittingly, on all levels. The way that cells reproduce is also memory. A kind of bodily, cellular, tissue mem

Affliction, like fire, can ultimately consume our physical selves, but unlike fire, it begins by destroying our social and psychological selves. At its extreme, it reduces us, if not to a dead husk of what we once were, to something equally gruesome: a being driven by nothing more than the instinct of survival, one that “blindly fastens itself to e