<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">I suspect some of the rest of you found inspiration in this review of Oliver Sach’s book on Gratitude in Brainpickings this morning.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Here it is… for Gordon and the rest of us..</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">
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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Georgia;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"" class=""><a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/11/24/oliver-sacks-gratitude-book/" class=""><b class=""><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#B4232A;text-decoration:none;
text-underline:none" class="">Oliver Sacks on Gratitude, the Measure of Living, and the
Dignity of Dying</span></b></a><o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i class=""><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:
Georgia;mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#1D1D1D" class="">“Living has yet to be generally recognized as
one of the arts,”</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: Georgia; color: rgb(29, 29, 29);" class=""> proclaimed a <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/04/04/the-art-of-living-1924/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">1924 guide to the art of living</span></a>. That one of
the greatest scientists of our time should be one of our greatest teacher in
that art is nothing short of a blessing for which we can only be grateful — and
that’s precisely what <b class="">Oliver Sacks</b> (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), a
Copernicus of the mind and a Dante of medicine who turned the case study into a
poetic form, became over the course of his long and <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/18/oliver-sacks-on-the-move/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">fully lived</span></a> life.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:Georgia;
mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#1D1D1D" class="">In his final months, Dr. Sacks
reflected on his unusual existential adventure and his courageous dance with
death in a series of lyrical <i class="">New York Times</i> essays, posthumously
published in the slim yet enormously enchanting book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gratitude-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0451492935/?tag=braipick-20" class=""><b class=""><i class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">Gratitude</span></i></b></a> (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/gratitude/oclc/923548020&referer=brief_results" class=""><i class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">public library</span></i></a>), edited by his friend and
assistant of thirty years, Kate Edgar, and his partner, the photographer <a href="http://www.billhayes.com/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">Bill Hayes</span></a>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:Georgia;
mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#1D1D1D" class="">In the first essay, titled
“Mercury,” he follows in the footsteps of Henry Miller, who <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/06/26/henry-miller-on-turning-eighty/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">considered the measure of a life well lived upon turning
eighty</span></a> three decades earlier. Dr. Sacks writes:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">Last night I dreamed about mercury — huge, shining globules of
quicksilver rising and falling. Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a
reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since
boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. At 11, I could say “I am sodium”
(Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about
to begin, only to realize it is almost over.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:Georgia;
mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#1D1D1D" class="">Having almost died at forty-one <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/09/oliver-sacks-a-leg-to-stand-on/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">while being chased by a white bull in a Norwegian fjord</span></a>,
Dr. Sacks considers the peculiar grace of having lived to old age:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical
problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!”
sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect… I am grateful that I
have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have
been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends,
colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an
intercourse with the world.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am
sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no
languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced
other cultures as widely as I should have done.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:Georgia;
mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#1D1D1D" class="">But pushing up from beneath the
wistful self-awareness is Dr. Sacks’s fundamental buoyancy of spirit. Echoing <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/09/23/george-eliot-happiness/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">George Eliot on the life-cycle of happiness</span></a>
and <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/26/thoreau-on-growing-old/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">Thoreau on the greatest gift of growing older</span></a>,
he writes:<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(109, 109, 109); font-size: 14pt;" class="">My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one
of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a
shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long
experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen
triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great
achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only
to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and,
perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived
sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my
bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. 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.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:Georgia;
mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#1D1D1D" class="">In another essay, titled “My Own
Life” and penned shortly after learning of his terminal cancer diagnosis at the
age of eighty-one, Dr. Sacks reckons with the potentiality of living that
inhabits the space between him and his death:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(109, 109, 109); font-size: 14pt;" class="">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. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers,
David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a
short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own
Life.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have
suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have,
notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s
abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the
same gaiety in company.”<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:Georgia;
mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#1D1D1D" class="">Gliding his mind’s eye over one of
Hume’s most poignant lines — <i class="">“It is difficult to be more detached from life
than I am at present.”</i> — Dr. Sacks considers the paradoxical way in which
detachment becomes an instrument of presence:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from
a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the
connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in
the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love,
to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of
understanding and insight.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:Georgia;
mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#1D1D1D" class="">Such intensity of aliveness, Dr.
Sacks observes, requires a deliberate distancing from the existentially
inessential things with which we fill our daily lives — petty arguments,
politics, the news. With his characteristic mastery of nuance, he points to a
crucial distinction:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply
about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but
these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I
meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases.
I feel the future is in good hands.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:Georgia;
mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;color:#1D1D1D" class="">Decades after his beloved aunt
Lennie <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/26/oliver-sacks-on-the-move-aunt-lennie/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">taught him about dying with dignity and courage</span></a>,
Dr. Sacks lets this lesson come abloom in his own life. True to the defining
enchantment of his books, he turns his luminous prose inward, then outward, and
in a passage that calls to mind William Faulkner’s <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/06/william-faulkner-malcolm-cowley-epitaph/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">sublime living obituary</span></a>, he exits this world —
the world of writing and the world of life, for the two were always one for Dr.
Sacks — with a breathtaking epitaph for himself:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">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.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(109, 109, 109);" class="">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.</span></p>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:15.0pt;font-family:Georgia;mso-fareast-font-family:
"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-bidi-font-family:Georgia;
color:#1D1D1D;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-language:
AR-SA" class=""><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gratitude-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0451492935/?tag=braipick-20" class=""><b class=""><i class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">Gratitude</span></i></b></a> is a bittersweet and
absolutely beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with Dr. Sacks on <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/09/oliver-sacks-a-leg-to-stand-on/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">the life-saving power of music</span></a>, <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/19/oliver-sacks-thom-gunn-writing/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">the strange psychology of writing</span></a>, and <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/18/oliver-sacks-on-the-move/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">his story of love, lunacy, and a life fully lived</span></a>,
then revisit my <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/31/remembering-oliver-sacks/" class=""><span style="color:#B4232A" class="">remembrance of Dr. Sacks’s singular spirit</span></a>.</span><!--EndFragment--> </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">Paul Schrijnen</div></blockquote></div><div class=""><div class="">13 Bloemfontein Avenue</div><div class="">London W12 7BJ</div><div class=""><a href="mailto:paulschrijnen@gmail.com" class="">paulschrijnen@gmail.com</a></div><div class="">+44 7973 206 766 </div><div class="">skype: paulus.schrijnen</div></div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">
<div class="">Paul Schrijnen</div><div class="">13 Bloemfontein Avenue</div><div class="">London W12 7BJ</div><div class=""><a href="mailto:paulschrijnen@gmail.com" class="">paulschrijnen@gmail.com</a></div><div class="">+44 7973 206 766 </div><div class="">skype: paulus.schrijnen</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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