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“I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life.” Oliver Sacks
Hearing happy, laughing people is no cure for insomnia but has an ameliorative effect on brokenheartedness.
I sent him photographs I had taken in Central Park of bare tree limbs. I thought they looked like vascular capillaries. With his neurologist’s eye, he felt they looked like neurons. “I am reminded of how Nabokov compared winter trees to the nervous systems of giants,” he wrote back.
But taking wrong trains, encountering unexpected delays, and suffering occasional mechanical breakdowns are inevitable to any journey really worth taking. One learns to get oneself turned around and headed the right way.
I cannot take a subway without marveling at the lottery logic that brings together a random sampling of humanity for one minute or two, testing us for kindness and compatibility. Is that not what civility is?
“Sometimes it will be difficult and you’ll question why you ever moved here. But New York will always answer you.”
O: “I don’t regret the things I’ve done but those I haven’t done. In that way, I’m like a criminal …”
1-1-12: Just before midnight, I taught O how to open a bottle of champagne, something he had never done before: sweet to see the joy and surprise and fear on his face as—pop!—the cork exploded. He had insisted on wearing his swimming goggles, though, just in case.
O: “Are you conscious of your thoughts before language embodies them?”
It is the enforced intimacy of being in a cab, an enclosed space, for a finite period of time, which makes such conversations possible. I’ve sometimes wondered if the screen between driver and passenger, not unlike that in a confessional booth, adds to this impression. You might say things you would never say otherwise, or do things you’d never do, knowing you’ll never see them again.
He reads it to himself first, savoring the words, and then aloud to me: “‘Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation lives many Lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a Shadow; make time to come present—’”
I’ve come to believe that a good cry is like a car wash for the soul.
A meteor has fallen to earth, I hear on the TV news. It’s good to be reminded that we’re not in charge. That we live in a solar system.
“The primary cortex! The genius of the primary cortex!”
“I am glad to be on planet Earth with you. It would be much lonelier otherwise.”
How those three words define our life right now: Let’s do more.
“The most we can do is to write—intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively—about what it is like living in the world at this time.”
Yet not wanting to forget something is not the same as wishing to remember it better.
“I say I love writing, but really it is thinking I love—that rush of thoughts—new connections in the brain being made. And it comes out of the blue.” O smiled. “In such moments: I feel such love of the world, love of thinking…”
You can’t imagine them going on without you. But they do. We do. Every day, we may wake up and say, What’s the point? Why go on? And, there is really only one answer: To be alive.
