Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life

“The meaning of life… clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.”

Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgentl...