May 24–25, 2019
Unlike the notes on the other OS Sacks books on this site, this was not — I don’t think! — read as part of the essays project with CT. Although I feel confident he has read it. I think that it was this book, my favorite of his works, that awakened my interest in him as an essayist, and let to the long detour that CT and I have taken through his ouvre.
What follows are my notes from circa 2019, in a less structured form than has been my later custom.
1. Mercury
- He dreamed of Mercury, shimmering blobs rising and falling: Mercury, element 80, is a symbol of his age.
- Other elements have taken their turn – Gold for 79 – signaling his lifelong interest in periodic table of the elements.
- He writes of a near death experience at 41, accompanied by thoughts of gratitude, and giving and giving back.
- … and of his pleasure in being alive, with positive and negative experiences…
- … and of his regrets, and what it might mean to complete a life…
- His hope for his end: to die in harness, as did Francis Crick.
- His feeling of age not as 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 war, great achievements and deep ambiguities.
One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts.
One is more conscious of transience and beauty.
At eighty, one can take the 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 forty or sixty.
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.
Reflections
The image that opens the essay is nice, and the connection to the periodic table, which recurs later in the book, gives a particularity to the author. The essay seems to me to wander, which is perhaps fitting given its concluding words about age as a time to expand and explore. But though it wanders, it moves thorough familiar territory: gratitude, what it means to live, and what it means to come to the end of life. The closing thoughts on age as an expansion and a time of freedom are comforting and poetic.
2. My Own Life
- Learns that his cancer has metastasized, and is now face to face with dying.
- Foremost in his mind is how to live out remaining days in the deepest, richest way.
- Encouraged by David Hume’s reflections – and his written-in-one-day biography from which he takes his title.
- A bit about his vehement disposition, in contrast with Hume’s; but still he shares Hume’s feeling of detachment.
- Seeing his life from an altitude, and reflecting on how to live out his days:
deepening friendships, farewells to loved ones, travel if possible, achieve new understandings and insights. - A feeling that time is pressing, and a detachment from the news and future-oriented issues like climate change.
- His generation its way out, with each death of a contemporary feeling like an ablation.
- His predominant feeling is 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…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.
Reflections
It is interesting that essay is titled after (and modeled on?) Hume’s essay, and reminds me how in the previous essay he looked towards Francis Crick’s reaction to his own approaching death. We look around us for models, and as Sack looks to Crick and Hume, so, perhaps, will others look towards Sacks. I resonate with Sacks’ feeling of detachment: even not facing death, I begin to feel that it is time for those younger than I to set the direction and shape the dialog. Again, the closing words are comforting and poetic, and capture much of what I value about life.
3. My Periodic Table
Notes
- He anticipates the weekly arrival of Nature and Science; he’s had a lifelong fascination with the physical sciences.
- He’s sad not to see what the future will bring, vis a vis the answers to various scientific questions.
- The splendor of the mist of stars in the night leads to thoughts of how little time he has left; he says this to his companions, and they say we will wheel you out when you are dying.
- He has been touched by the many letters of thanks and appreciation in response to “My Own Life,” but they don’t hit as hard as night sky did.
- Since childhood, he has dealt with loss by turning to the non-human:
now he lays out metals and minerals, “little emblems of eternity,” on a table beside his chair. - He’s had a surge of energy in the wake of a temporary treatment of his disease;
now that has ebbed and he is experiencing bodily decline. - Return to the table of elements:
Bisthmus, element 83, an age he does not expect to see; Beryllium, element 4, a reminder of his childhood.
Reflections
Except for the fascination with minerals, this essay does not speak as much to me. The thought of taking comfort in the non-human is interesting, as are reflections about, what, in general, gives comfort. I’m not sure I know.
4. Sabbath
- Background on growing up in an Orthodox family with many siblings; the family kept the Sabbath.
- What keeping the Sabbath looked like in an orthodox community: Synagogue; walking; visits.
- Sack’s drift away from Judaism, his coming out as gay, and the consequent familial rejection that reinforces his negative feelings towards religion.
- His move to the States, amphetamine addiction, and recovery and career as medical ‘storyteller’ in New York.
- Getting to know his orthodox cousin, a Nobel Laureate, and stories about his cousins commitment to Sabbath.
- On a visit to Israel, he experiences the embrace of distant family, now accepting of his homosexuality and his partner – how attitudes have changed!
- The return of his cancer, approaching death, and parallel between restfulness of sabbath and the end of life
The peace of the Sabbath,
of a stopped world, a time outside time,
was palpable, infused everything…
Reflections
I like the notion of the Sabbath as the stopping of the world. Though what it does is shift the patterns of daily life away from the mundane and automatic towards activity that is considered and community-oriented.
One of the more unexpected things about retirement is how it has shifted my patterns of activity. Whereas work divided the weeks into ‘weekdays’ and ‘weekends,’ and the year into ‘work’ and ‘vacation,’ those divisions have now largely vanished. Weekends are signified primarily by the shift in activity around me: of urban life in the large, and in the activities of my friends who still work. Similarly, ‘vacations,’ which used to be a time to rest and recharge so that I could return to ‘work’ with new energy and perspectives, have lost much of their significance. There is no longer the stress of work which makes rest a welcome thing; nor is there the prospect of some future work to which any renewed vigor might be applied. Vacations primarily mean a change of scene and rhythm, and at most provide some shifts in perspective on the familiar patterns of life to which I return. To the extent rhythms remain in my personal sphere, they are provided through participation in institutions, in my case the rhythms associated with university courses and my piano lessons.
While I do structure my weeks so that appointments, phone calls and the few meetings I participate in are restricted to the week days, the truth is that the weekdays have few obligatory activities, and the primary thing that gives my week structure is my Friday piano lesson. The lesson feels like a landmark, a temporal Transamerica tower, that I am aware of from different vantage points. Although rather than providing me with a sense of orientation as I move past on my way elsewhere, the lesson comes steadily towards me and the orientation has to do with how many days I have to make progress in various pieces by its arrival. (Days matter because shards of what I practice migrate from my frontal cortex to my cerebellum while I sleep, and at the piano in the morning I can discover that my fingers can now fluidly execute what was yesterday a labored production.)
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