Status Updates From The Mind of a Mnemonist: A ...

With each individual there is a dividing line between imagination and reality; for most of us whose imaginations have distinct limits, this is fairly clearcut. In S.'s case the borderline between the two had broken down, for the images his imagination conjured up took on the feel of reality.

You know why they have music in restaurants? Because it changes the taste of everything. If you select the right kind of music, everything tastes good. Surely people who work in restaurants know this

what takes over are vague synesthetic sensations, a state in which there is no real borderline between perceptions and emotions; where images of the external world blend and become part of diffuse experiences; where sensations seem so vague and shifting it is hard to find words with which to convey them.

Not even fire could wipe out the traces he wanted to obliterate!

S. saw faces as changing patterns of light and shade, much the same kind of impression a person would get if he were sitting by a window watching the ebb and flow of the sea's waves.* Who, indeed, could possibly "recall" all the fluctuations of the waves' movements?

I recognize a word not only by the images it evokes
but by a whole complex of feelings that image arouses.
It's hard to express .

You know there are people who seem to have many
voices, whose voices seem to be an entire composition,
a bouquet. The late S. M. Eisenstein† had just such a
voice: listening to him, it was as though a flame with
fibers protruding from it was advancing right toward
me. I got so interested in his voice, I couldn't follow
what he was saying...

"Jewish boy who, having failed as a musician and as a journalist, had
become a mnemonist, met with many prominent people, yet remained a somewhat anchorless person, living with the expectation that at any moment something particularly fine was to come his way. "

The tragedy of waiting, kind of like giovani droggo in real life