Gratitude

by Oliver Sacks

Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.

nunc dimittis—“I

Francis Crick

“Whatever has a beginning must have an ending.”

I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends. I shall no longer look at the NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming. This is not indifference but detachment—I

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

neutrons are very slightly heavier than protons,

ingots

doffed

gefilte

Sha...

shul

hazan.

adopted diluted, attenuated forms of Judaism.

tefillin

I craved some deeper connection—“meaning”—in my life, and it was the absence of this, I think, that drew me into near-suicidal addiction to amphetamines in the 1960s.

I felt my roots lay in the great neurological case histories of the nineteenth century (and I was encouraged here by the great Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria). It was a lonely but deeply satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.

Robert John Aumann,

mezuzah

I realized that I had, within a few seconds, reversed a decision of almost sixty years.

The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia,

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth;

SEEING VOICES

In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness,