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.