On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

Sometimes I felt that I was inscribing a line on the surface of the earth, at other times that I was poised motionless above the ground, the whole planet rotating silently beneath me.

I suspect my nostalgia may be not only for the place itself but for youth, and a very different time, and being in love, and being able to say, “The future is before me.”

As the decorous stranger discreetly retired, I asked Wystan how he experienced the world, whether he thought of it as being a very small or very large place. “Neither,” he replied. “Neither large nor small. Cozy, cozy.” He added in an undertone, “Like home.”

made me think of how Darwin was so astonished by the plants and animals in Australia that he wrote in his journal, “Two distinct Creators must have been at work.”

Skip told us one could sometimes see birds or butterflies which had been carried thousands of miles, even from Africa, in the eye of the storm.