"In July 2013, Oliver Sacks turned eighty and wrote [a] ... piece in The New York Times about the prospect of old age and the freedom he envisioned for himself in binding together the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime. Eighteen months later, he was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer--which he announced publically in another piece in The New York Times. Gratitude is Sacks's meditation on why life [continued] to enthrall him even as he [faced] the all-too-close presence of his own death, and how to live out the months that [remained] in the richest and deepest way possible"--
"There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death."
Picked it up on impulse. Tiny little thing, more of a pamphlet than a book, comprising three essays he wrote as he was dying.
What I want to remember
+ The idea of a "periodic life" is neat: collecting an element, its periodic number equalling the collector's age, each year. Sometimes it's a small nugget of gold and sometimes it's a radioactive element in a lead container.
+ Sachs being happy, fit, active and spry into his 80s. Ceasing to care much about political or tedious things. "I'm closer to being a century old than anything else.." is a dose of perspective.
+ His phrasing when writing about wanting to have lived a "good and useful life" lines up nearly perfectly with the portion I'm currently reading of Mastering the Core Teachings the Buddha wherein it written that the point of living in the world and training in morality is …
Picked it up on impulse. Tiny little thing, more of a pamphlet than a book, comprising three essays he wrote as he was dying.
What I want to remember
+ The idea of a "periodic life" is neat: collecting an element, its periodic number equalling the collector's age, each year. Sometimes it's a small nugget of gold and sometimes it's a radioactive element in a lead container.
+ Sachs being happy, fit, active and spry into his 80s. Ceasing to care much about political or tedious things. "I'm closer to being a century old than anything else.." is a dose of perspective.
+ His phrasing when writing about wanting to have lived a "good and useful life" lines up nearly perfectly with the portion I'm currently reading of Mastering the Core Teachings the Buddha wherein it written that the point of living in the world and training in morality is to live a good and useful life. It's not necessarily Buddhist or even interesting to want to live a "good and useful life" but I wonder what he would have said if prompted to elaborate on how and why he wanted to do so.
