After publishing town blogs posts last week, five here, and five for Dementia Alliance International as part of our contribution to Dementia Awareness Week UK 2015, not surprisingly, I have been too tired to blog at all over the weekend!
And then, when I had decided to have another day off, this wonderful post, by Maria Popova arrived in my Inbox, another one just too good not to share, and eminently PERFECT for me to read today!
Love, Lunacy, and a Life Fully Lived: Oliver Sacks, the Science of Seeing, and the Art of Being Seen
by Maria Popova
A touching celebration of the “intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.”
“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,”visionary neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in his poignant, beautiful, and courageous farewell to life. In one final gesture of generosity, this cartographer of the mind and its meaning maps the landscape of his remarkable character and career in On the Move: A Life (public library) — an uncommonly moving autobiography, titled after a line from a poem by his dear friend Thom Gunn: “At worst,” wrote Gunn, “one is in motion; and at best, / Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, / One is always nearer by not keeping still.” Sacks’s unstillness is that of a life defined by a compassionate curiosity — about the human mind, about the human spirit, about the invisibilia of our inner lives.
I know that place.
LikeLike