Memory Ramblings

As a child wandering the globe, I brought along a healthy dose of Soviet skepticism. Upon exiting Russia and arriving in the UK at London's Heathrow Airport, I looked around at the Brits and asked "What are all these foreigners doing here?" My parents laughed, finding it 'cute.'

In order to acclimate, I read various books handed to me by my parents, and first among these was a general encyclopedia, written in English, of course. Daily I scanned numerous entries with an insatiable drive to understand, while at school the only words I dared utter to my young British peers were "let's go play" (It was the first grade, with plenty of recess built into the curriculum).

Unbeknownst to me or my peers, an intricate set of neural processes allowing accelerated learning and memory formation were underway in my ripening 7 year-old brain, and they were made possible by an ancient, highly-evolved need to survive. During sleep, I was terrorized by the recurring nightmare of coming to school naked, sitting in the front row, and unable to escape. Upon waking, there was only partial relief, as I would still have to navigate the day nakedly ignorant of English and dimly repeating that tired phrase: "let's go play." The young Brits must have found me an odd fellow. I could barely speak, though I downright thrashed the rest of the class in the Maths (as I write, I think: "What an odd thing to boast about decades later: performance in elementary school math. Who cares?" But then we all need some memories of triumph to boost the spirits from time to time.)

The pattern of my life in England went on in such manner for a little while longer - naked nightmares in sleep, semi-mutism at school, and hurried study of dictionaries and encyclopedias at home - until one day, I arrived at school and suddenly spoke fluent, accent-less English with my British peers, who had surely tolerated my one-phrase trick, "let's go play," more than it deserved. Without notice, one or two months after setting foot in this country of foreigners, I became one of them, acquired a best friend or two, and went about my days as if I were residing in my country of birth. A similar, sudden transformation would occur several years later when my family moved to Germany.

I look back with wonderment at what a child's brain is capable of - what humans are capable of. Our family moved from one place to another, and a strong survival mechanism kicked in every time, allowing me to master the language and mold my temperament to fit the presiding culture. As a child, I was naturally ignorant of the astounding neural plasticity involved in such feats.

Long-Term Potentiation in Learning and Memory, Queensland Brain Institute

Books played a pivotal role in my recurring acclimitization. When we arrived in America, I studied the encyclopedias, as usual, and got hung up with one entry in particular: Elvis Presley. For some reason, I considered him a hero despite rarely listening to his hits, and every time I re-read his entry, a profound sadness welled over when the entry desribed his untimely death.

Elvis helped introduce me to human fallibility and mortality, and I pondered the unanswerable questions of life: What good is it for humanity to lose one of its great men at so tender an age? As a teenager I would ask similar questions about the fates of Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, and, especially, Stevie Ray Vaughn. Is there a purpose to this, or isn't there?

One can easily enumerate a list of great figures who died prematurely, and lately I have been stuck on the late Christopher Hitchens, a journalist and author of inimitable wit coupled with an encyclopaedic knowledge of history and great literature. In debates, he was infamous for dispensing mercilessly with his enemies, usually authoritarian types, while sipping on strong drink and smoking cigarettes, both of which almost certainly contributed to his death from esophageal cancer.

Christopher's father had also died from esophageal cancer and similarly overindulged in alcohol and tobacco consumption. Knowing this, Christopher Hitchens stubbornly refused to deviate - the parties at his D.C. home were notorious escapes attended by intellectual elites, soaked in unimpeded revelry.

Among the many undertakings throughout his illustrious career, Christopher Hitchens wrote God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and embarked on a series of debates with various evangelical Christian, Roman Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, and Muslim faith leaders. In each one, he dispatched his opponents with considerable ease and the usual ascerbic wit. So as he lay dying of esophageal cancer, he described receiving a variety of mail from religious people: spiteful damnations to an imminent eternity of hell as well as prayers for his convalescence. After his passing, everyone who knew of him pondered the same question: Did Christopher Hitchens succumb to hypocrisy in praying to God for salvation on his deathbed? Surely, it would have been forgivable, given his embattled, tumor-ridden state.

Nobody will ever know. With the passing of each precious life, full of potential, we are haunted with the questions of purpose and meaning.

In my own life, I've often pondered the meaning of events: those that saw my family leave the Soviet Union, my dedication to medicine, an untimely derailment from a profession I loved, and recently, my unlikely return to a well-regarded Surgical residency. Did all of this have to happen? These are unanswerable questions, even from a strictly deterministic perspective.

Ernest Hemingway's well-worn quote about such matters was that "the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Considering his self-inflicted demise, even he didn't believe that. The best we can do when looking back at specific moments in the past, such as finding oneself in a country of foreigners or losing something you love, is to accept that no other version of events would have been possible at the time. Ruthlessly, time moves along as it must, without regard for feelings or hopes.

Foil on a Wire