One of the interviews in your book is with Floyd Skloot, who suffered similar damage after contracting postviral encephalopathy. In your conversation with him he talks about various tricks he uses to get by with a damaged memory. Did you find any of these tricks useful?

No, I have to work my own method out. For instance, I write down words that I see in the newspaper that I don't understand and don't know anymore. Oh, my God, I have about a 30-page book here that I write in, words that I want to remember. And I go over them often to try to refresh my memory.

Can you say what some of the last entries are?

Crapulous. You really want to know a few of them? Some of them are quite simple, but I've forgotten them. Parlous. Which means risky or dangerous. Curmudgeon. Obviously it's a word I know. It means a surly person of some sort. Pullulate. Words like that. I have 30 pages of these words.

"On the Sea of Memory: A Journey From Forgetting to Remembering"

By Jonathan Cott

Random House

214 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

The interviews touch on both personal and cultural memory, and sometimes it seems as if you're mourning the loss of one right alongside the loss of the other.

There's social amnesia as well as personal amnesia. Most Americans don't remember what happened a few years ago. It's all what appears now on television. They don't remember what happened in 1953 in Iran, when [Mohammed] Mossadegh was removed from power, and what that means for present-day politics in the Middle East. At the same time Americans have this wonderful, insatiable curiosity about the American Revolution, with all these bestselling books about Washington and Jefferson and Adams. They can remember that period but they don't want to remember what happened in Central America under Reagan's administration, which I've been reading a lot about recently.

What drew you to that subject in particular?

There's a poet I like very much named Carolyn Forché, and she wrote a book ... I'm trying to remember the name. It's a really extraordinary book of poems: "The Country Between Us." It's a book of poems about El Salvador during the fighting that happened there, and they are just extremely powerful poems. This is someone I had interviewed, apparently. I know I interviewed her because I have the interview. It was published in a book of mine. But actually I do remember that interview because that was before my memory faded out. And I guess I remember the El Salvador war a little bit, so that's a bad example. I'm just trying to think of something else ...

What was the question again?

What draws you to learn about specific subjects.

Well, I learned about Srebrenica recently, with the anniversary of it. It hit my heart so bad. Then again a lot of people in Serbia didn't want to admit that it had happened. So they refused to remember it, and I didn't remember it myself -- but of course for different reasons. I had forgotten because of my shock treatments; they had forgotten because of whatever shock of conscience they had.

To return to the book for a moment, the interviews at the beginning seem to focus more on science and the interviews at the end more on religion. Did you find one or the other more useful to you personally?

I learned from the science interviews because I knew nothing about the subject to begin with. I had to educate myself by reading many, many books, and as I told you I have a hard time reading. So you can imagine it was very difficult to understand even the basic material necessary to approach these neuroscientists. I learned from the spiritual people as well, but I tended to be more moved by what they said. Especially Robert Frager, with his discussion of the Sufi remembrance ritual, the dhikr.

What's that?

That's the ceremony of remembrance, when the worshipers repeat the 99 names of God in Arabic. They sometimes do dancing motions, and there are certain breathing exercises that occur as well. I didn't know about that ritual. It's a journey within as well as a journey without. The word dhikr in Arabic designates both repetition and remembrance, and the idea is that the repetition of the name of God and the remembrance of God occur at the same moment. The repetition descends from the tongue to the heart, and the remembrance of the heart then deepens and becomes the remembrance of the soul. That struck me as very beautiful.

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