Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Decisions
- 2 The Injury
- 3 Coming to Terms with Brain Injury
- 4 The Origins of the Vegetative State
- 5 A Shift since Quinlan
- 6 Maggie's Wishes
- 7 Something Happened in Arkansas
- 8 From PVS to MCS
- 9 Leaving the Hospital
- 10 Heather's Story
- 11 Neuroimaging and Neuroscience in the Public Mind
- 12 Contractures and Contradictions: Medical Necessity and the Injured Brain
- 13 Minds, Monuments, and Moments
- 14 Heads and Hearts, Toil and Tears
- 15 What Do Families Want?
- 16 Deep Brain Stimulation in MCS
- 17 Mending Our Brains, Minding Our Ethics
- 18 It's Still Freedom
- 19 Maggie Is in Town
- 20 When Consciousness Becomes Prosthetic
- 21 The Rights of Mind
- 22 A Call for Advocacy
- Epilogue
- Notes
- In Memoriam
- Index
13 - Minds, Monuments, and Moments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Decisions
- 2 The Injury
- 3 Coming to Terms with Brain Injury
- 4 The Origins of the Vegetative State
- 5 A Shift since Quinlan
- 6 Maggie's Wishes
- 7 Something Happened in Arkansas
- 8 From PVS to MCS
- 9 Leaving the Hospital
- 10 Heather's Story
- 11 Neuroimaging and Neuroscience in the Public Mind
- 12 Contractures and Contradictions: Medical Necessity and the Injured Brain
- 13 Minds, Monuments, and Moments
- 14 Heads and Hearts, Toil and Tears
- 15 What Do Families Want?
- 16 Deep Brain Stimulation in MCS
- 17 Mending Our Brains, Minding Our Ethics
- 18 It's Still Freedom
- 19 Maggie Is in Town
- 20 When Consciousness Becomes Prosthetic
- 21 The Rights of Mind
- 22 A Call for Advocacy
- Epilogue
- Notes
- In Memoriam
- Index
Summary
Tempus Fugit and MCS
During the summer of 2010, I presented a lecture at the Third International Conference on Disorders of Consciousness at the Campus di Baronissi Facolta de Medicina e Cirugia just outside of Salerno, itself an important seat of medical knowledge in medieval Italy. The conference took place about an hour's drive from the spectacular Greco-Roman ruins of Paestum, the Latinized name given to a settlement named for the sea-god Poseidon. Now several kilometers inland, Paestum was fittingly once on the Mediterranean. The passage of millennia has landlocked the ruin and deprived the modern tourist of glimmering seascape vistas that the ancients once enjoyed. Today, the visitor can only imagine that the sea lies just beyond the next archaeological mound.
The conference's proximity to Paestum was fitting because the most famous of its findings is the ancient Tomb of the Diver. On a series of white slabs, from which his coffin is made, the tomb depicts the passage of a young man to the afterlife. En route, he attends a symposium, embarks on a procession, and – most remarkably – dives naked into an awaiting pool from the Pillars of Hercules (see Figure 3).
The image captures the diver in mid-flight suspended in a moment. Despite the image's flat relief, its ancient artisan depicts time as a fourth dimension. By freezing the young man between life and death, he is “forever overhead” as the archaeologists S. DiGregorio and M. T. Granese note. DiGregorio and Granese describe the diver's portrayal as “the unmeasureable interval between and unrepeatable before and unimaginable after.”
An Eternal Present
When I heard their account of the diver, I was reminded of Augustine's conception of an “eternal present” in which the deity is similarly suspended in all time. Like the diver's moment, this too is an “unmeasureable interval” because it is an infinite convergence of past, present, and future.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rights Come to MindBrain Injury, Ethics, and the Struggle for Consciousness, pp. 165 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015