Gaston Bachelard on the Meditative Magic of Housework and How It Increases the Human Dignity of Everyday Objects

“Consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions.”

When faced with a poetic image, writes the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (June 27, 1884–October 19, 1962) in his 1957 classic The Poetics of Space (public library), “we are in the presence of a minuscule phenomenon of the shimmering consciousness.” Bachelard is himself the proprietor of a shimmering consciousness, but although he is one of the most wonderful — in the literal sense of “full of wonder” — minds of the twentieth century and a major influence for such luminaries as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, he remains thoroughly underappreciated.

Trained as a philosopher of science, Bachelard is palpably drawn to the Eastern spiritual traditions, his mind seemingly the self-contained scene of Einstein and Tagore’s famous conversation. There is a meditative quality to his writing, reflecting a deeply meditative mind. In his 1957 masterwork, he extends an invitation to embodied presence, triply timely amid our disembodied digital culture, and beckons the attention not by screaming but by seduction — nowhere more so than in the passages celebrating the enchantment of housework.

Three decades before Ursula K. Le Guin framed housekeeping as a “complex art [learned] only by methodical, repeated, long-continued practice,” Bachelard writes:

[The] daydreams that accompany household activities … keep vigilant watch over the house, they link its immediate past to its immediate future, they are what maintains it in the security of being.

What confers this imaginative dignity upon housework, Bachelard argues, is the quality of attention we bring to its simple tasks:

How can housework be made into a creative activity?

The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of old furniture, we sense new impressions come into being beneath this familiar domestic duty. For consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions.

Perhaps because he came from a family of shoemakers, Bachelard finds especial allure in the tactile transcendence of menial work:

How wonderful it is to really become once more the inventor of a mechanical action! And so, when [one] rubs a piece of furniture — even vicariously — when he puts a little fragrant wax on his table with the woolen cloth that lends warmth to everything it touches, he creates a new object; he increases the object’s human dignity; he registers this object officially as a member of the human household.

It bears noting that Bachelard’s use of “he” is what Le Guin calls “the generic he” in her spectacular essay on being a man. Here, too, “he” really means “she,” for it is the housewife — an inherently feminine archetype by both etymology and demographic distribution, especially in his era — that Bachelard celebrates as the chief practitioner of this creative activity:

Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order. From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.

Illustration by Yaroslava from 'A Stocking for a Kitten' by Helen Kay. Click image for more.

Bachelard considers “women’s construction of the house through daily polishing” and writes:

If we attain to the limit at which dream becomes exaggerated, we experience a sort of consciousness of constructing the house, in the very pains we take to keep it alive, to give it all its essential clarity. A house that shines from the care it receives appears to have been rebuilt from the inside; it is as though it were new inside. In the intimate harmony of walls and furniture, it may be said that we become conscious of a house that is built by women, since men only know how to build a house from the outside, and they know little or nothing of the “wax” civilization.

[…]

We can sense how a human being can devote himself to things and make them his own by perfecting their beauty. A little more beautiful and we have something quite different.

By tending and attending to objects in this way, Bachelard argues, we reawaken to their beauty, essentially reimagining them and creating them anew:

Through housewifely care a house recovers not so much its originality as its origin. And what a great life it would be if, every morning, every object in the house could be made anew by our hands, could “issue” from our hands. In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent van Gogh tells him that we should “retain something of the original character of a Robinson Crusoe.” Make and remake everything oneself, make a “supplementary gesture” toward each object, give another facet to the polished reflections, all of which are so many boons the imagination confers upon us by making us aware of the house’s inner growth. To have an active day I keep saying to myself, “Every morning I must give a thought to Saint Robinson.” … A dreamer can reconstruct the world from an object that he transforms magically through his care of it.

The Poetics of Space is an indispensable read in its entirety. Complement it with Bachelard’s followup, The Poetics of Reverie, then revisit the delightful 1935 proto-feminist children’s book The Story of a Man Who Wanted to Do Housework.

For a living testament to Bachelard’s faith in the worldbuilding capacity of housework, see Carol Devine and Wendy Trusler’s magnificent The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning.

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Rothko on Beauty, Friendship, and How the Emotional Exaltation of Art Mirrors Human Relationships

“Beauty conforms to the demands of the spirit.”

People often weep before the paintings of Mark Rothko (September 25, 1903–February 25, 1970) — something he believed was a different side of the same spiritual transcendence he himself experienced while painting them.

In The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art (public library) — that remarkable compendium of Rothko’s little-known writings on art and storytelling, published by his children three decades after his death — the beloved painter examines how this contagious rapture of art works its magic on the beholder and, in doing so, exposes the invisible mesh of mutuality binding us together in a web of human affection.

Mark Rothko

Writing nearly a century after Leo Tolstoy’s insightful assertion that “emotional infectiousness” is the most important criterion for good art, Rothko considers the function of beauty not only as a deeply emotional experience but as a bonding agent that creates deep resonance between those beholding it:

The perception of beauty is definitely an emotional experience. That does not mean exclusively the human emotionalism of sentiment or sensuousness (as has already been shown), but instead that the process involves an exaltation which is communicated to us through the emotional system. This exaltation is usually composed of sentiment, sensation, and, in its highest state, intellectual approbation… Beauty conforms to the demands of the spirit. The experience of beauty may also be a sign of the reception of the creative impulse.

Rothko is careful to point out that technique alone doesn’t make for transcendence:

Skill itself is not an index to beauty. Of course, the artist must have sufficient means at his command to achieve his objective so that his work becomes convincingly communicative. But clearly it is something else which the art must communicate more than this before its author is seated among the immortals.

Noting that a wide range of creative stimuli can elicit the experience of beauty — from sculptures to sonatas, from paintings to people — Rothko examines to the undergirding psychological commonality:

Beauty … is a certain type of emotional exaltation which is the result of stimulation by certain qualities common to all great works of art.

Mark Rothko, 'Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red' (1949)

But Rothko’s most delicate point deals with the parallel between beauty and friendship — both the emotional exaltation of aesthetic pleasure, he suggests, and the warm resonance of human affection require an intimate tango between abstraction and particularity, between infinity and finitude. With an eye to Plato’s definition of beauty, Rothko writes:

Plato … states that somewhere in nature there exists an actual prototype, an abstract absolute of beauty, of which all the manifestations are simply different facets.

[…]

To feel beauty is to participate in the abstraction through a particular agency. In a sense, this is a reflection of the infiniteness of reality. For should we know the appearance of the abstraction itself, we would constantly reproduce only its image. As it is, we have the exhibition of the infinite variety of its inexhaustible facets, for which we should be thankful.

Let us consider the case of our relationship to our friends. We love them with a common love because we all participate in the common prototype of humanity, but because each human being is a new and different manifestation of this prototype we want to know more about each one. Yet we should not be able to enjoy our friends at all if they could not be referred to the common prototype, for through the recognition of this identity with the prototype are we able to make sensible observations of differences.

[…]

Our notions of beauty today are essentially Platonic.

One is reminded of Anne Lamott’s moving meditation on friendship and the difficult art of letting yourself be seen, in which she urged: “Trappings and charm wear off… Let people see you.” How often do we find ourselves too afraid to let others see beyond the neatly packaged prototype of what we appear to be and into the particular manifestations of our singular humanity, the very source of our beauty?

The Artist’s Reality, more of which you can devour here, is a beautiful read in its totality — a rare and revelatory glimpse of the convictions and creative credos from which some of the most powerful paintings in human history sprang. Complement it with Selden Rodman’s fantastic forgotten interview with Rothko, Oscar Wilde on art and temperament of receptivity, and Jeanette Winterson on why reaping art’s most transcendent rewards requires the paradoxical experience of active surrender.

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A Biologist-Turned-Buddhist and His Philosopher Father on the Nature of the Self and the True Measure of Personal Strength

“You first need to have an ego in order to be aware that it doesn’t exist.”

For the past few centuries, Western philosophy has maintained that human beings are driven by enlightened self-interest — a view predicated on the needs and desires of a solid self. Meanwhile, Eastern philosophies and spiritual traditions have long considered the self an illusion — a view with which modern science has recently begun to side.

These contradictory conceptions of the self as a centerpiece of identity and success, per the Western view, and as an illusion, per the Eastern one, are what French philosopher Jean-François Revel and his biologist-turned-Buddhist son, Matthieu Ricard, explore in their extraordinary conversation, published as The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life (public library).

What makes the conversation particularly compelling is the unusual pairing of perspectives — it is not only an intergenerational dialogue between a father and a son who both possess enormous intellectual potency, but a dialogue between Western philosophy and Eastern spirituality with a strong emphasis on science. The scientific perspective, in fact, comes not from Revel but from Ricard, who gave up a promising career as a molecular biologist — he had worked with Nobel laureate Jacques Monod — to move to Nepal and study Tibetan Buddhism. Doubly significant is Ricard’s route to Buddhism: Raised in the strongly secular home of two prominent French intellectuals — his mother, Revel’s wife, was the painter Yahne Le Toumelin — he grew up with only an intellectual curiosity toward religion and turned to Buddhism not out of disappointment with Western faiths but out of what his father calls “a state of indifference to any religion, a kind of religious weightlessness.”

Matthieu Ricard (right) with his father, Jean-François Revel (Photograph: Raphaelle Demandre)

So in 1999, when Revel traveled to Ricard’s home in Kathmandu and the two sat down for this remarkable intellectual encounter, it was the philosophical rather than the religion dimensions of Buddhism that took center stage as the father and son contemplated such immutable human concerns as free will, the meaning of life, the value of scientific progress, and the pillars of the good life. As they speak, each addresses the other as much as he is confabulating with himself, which results in a masterpiece of the art of conversation at its most elevated and ennobling — an exchange of dynamic contemplation between and within minds, driven not by the self-righteous slinging of opinions but by a deep commitment to mutual understanding and to enriching the shared pool of wisdom.

One of the most pause-giving dimensions of the conversation deals with this notion of the self and its illusory nature. When Revel takes issue with the Buddhist concept of reincarnation, pointing out its mystical and scientifically ungrounded suppositions, Ricard emphasizes its metaphorical and philosophical importance over its literal interpretation. Embedded in that notion, he suggests, is the key to unmooring ourselves from the tyranny of the self in the here and now:

It’s important to understand that what’s called reincarnation in Buddhism has nothing to do with the transmigration of some “entity” or other… As long as one thinks in terms of entities rather than function and continuity, it’s impossible to understand the Buddhist concept of rebirth.

[…]

Since Buddhism denies the existence of any individual self that could be seen as a separate entity capable of transmigrating from one existence to another by passing from one body to another, one might well wonder what it could be that links those successive states of existence together… It’s seen as a continuum, a stream of consciousness that continues to flow without there being any fixed or autonomous entity running through it.

Illustration from 'The Magic Boat' by Tom Seidmann-Freud, Sigmund Freud's niece. Click image for more.

Ricard likens this concept to “a river without a boat descending along its course” and is careful to point out a common misconception: Although Buddhism denies the existence of the individual self, it doesn’t deny individual consciousness. He explains:

The fact that there’s no such discontinuous entity being transferred from one life to the next doesn’t mean that there can’t be a continuity of functioning. That the self has no true existence doesn’t prevent one particular stream of consciousness from having qualities that distinguish it from another stream. The fact that there’s no boat floating down the river doesn’t prevent the water from being full of mud, polluted by a paper factory, or clean and clear. The state of the river at any given moment is the result of its history. In the same way, an individual stream of consciousness is loaded with all the traces left on it by positive and negative thoughts, as well as by actions and words arising from those thoughts. What we’re trying to do by spiritual practice is to gradually purify the river. The ultimate state of complete clarity is what we call spiritual realization. All the negative emotions, all the obscurations that render the underlying wisdom invisible, have then been dissolved.

Echoing the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki’s assertion that “the ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow,” Ricard argues that this recognition of individual consciousness is central to the dissolution of the ego-shell:

It’s not a question of annihilating the self, which has never really existed, but simply of uncovering its imposture. Indeed, if the self did have any intrinsic existence we’d never be able to bring it from existence into nonexistence.

[…]

A nonexistent self can’t really be “abolished,” but its nonexistence can be recognized. What we want to abolish is the illusion, the mistake that has no inherent existence in the first place… whatever we judge to be disagreeable or harmful. But as soon as we recognize that the self has no true existence, all these attracting and repelling impulses will vanish… The self has neither beginning nor end, and therefore in the present it has no more existence than the mind attributes to it.

Ricard, who has since written about the secret of happiness, considers how our natural, everyday experience of the “I” mutates into the illusion of the self, from which all of our suffering stems:

There’s a natural feeling of self, of “I,” which makes you think “I’m cold, I’m hungry, I’m walking,” and so forth. By itself, that feeling is neutral. It doesn’t specifically lead to either happiness or suffering. But then comes the idea that the self is a kind of constant that lasts all your life, regardless of all the physical and mental changes you go through. You get attached to the idea of being a self, “myself,” a “person,” and of “my” body, “my” name, “my” mind, and so on. Buddhism accepts that there is a continuum of consciousness, but denies any existence of a solid, permanent, and autonomous self anywhere in that continuum. The essence of Buddhist practice is therefore to get rid of that illusion of a self which so falsifies our view of the world.

Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. Click image for more.

When his father probes how one is expected to effect positive change in the world without a sense of personal agency — another common critique by those who misunderstand the foundational philosophies of Buddhism — Ricard responds:

The wish to allay others’ suffering, which may inspire a whole lifetime’s work, is an admirable ambition. It’s important to distinguish between negative emotions, like desire, hatred, and pride, that solidify still further our self-centered outlook, and positive ones, like altruistic love, compassion, and faith, that allow us to free ourselves little by little from those negative and self-centered tendencies. Positive emotions don’t disturb our mind, they reinforce it and make it more stable and more courageous.

In a sentiment that calls to mind David Foster Wallace on the dark side of ambition, Ricard makes an important distinction between the two types of ambition:

Positive ambition — the pursuit of others’ well-being by all possible means, the fervent wish to transform oneself — is one of the cardinal virtues in Buddhism. In fact, Buddhists nurture one main ambition without any limits, that of removing the suffering of all living beings throughout the whole universe. That sort of ambition stops you succumbing to inertia and makes you strong-minded and determined. So the distinction between the positive and negative, selfless and self-centered sides of ambition is important. You could say that ambition is positive if its aim is to help others. That’s the simplest definition. Conversely, ambition is negative if achieving it is detrimental to others, and an emotion is negative if it destroys your own and others’ inner peace.

He illustrates this with a verse from the eight-century Buddhist sage Shantideva:

All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.
Is there need for lengthy explanation?
Childish beings look out for themselves,
While Buddhas labor for the good of others:
See the difference that divides them!

With that great Eastern capacity for holding paradox and fusing contradictory concepts into a unity of wisdom, Ricard argues that shedding the ego-shell actually requires first fortifying our ego — more than that, he suggests, true altruism is the product not of selflessness but of a strong sense of self:

Buddhism’s goal of uncovering the “imposture of the ego,” this ego that seems so powerful and causes us so much trouble while having no existence in itself. Nevertheless, as a first step it’s important to stabilize this feeling of a self in order to distinguish all its characteristics. You could say, paradoxically, that you first need to have an ego in order to be aware that it doesn’t exist. Someone with an unstable, fragmented, amorphous personality has little chance of being able to identify that powerful feeling of “me,” as a prior step to recognizing that it doesn’t correspond to any real entity. So you need to start with a healthy and coherent self to be able to investigate it. You can shoot at a target, but not in fog.

[…]

But it’s important not to think that once the imposture of the ego is unmasked you find yourself in a state of inner nothingness, to the point that the destruction of the personality renders you incapable of acting or communicating. You don’t become an empty container. It’s quite the opposite. When you’re no longer the plaything of an illusory despot, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, your wisdom, love for others and compassion can be freely expressed. It’s a freedom from the limitations imposed by attachment to a self, not at all an anesthesia of the will. This “opening of the eyes of wisdom” increases your strength of mind, your diligence, and your capacity to take appropriate and altruistic action.

Revel contrasts this with the West’s “cult of the self” and our civilizational emphasis on “the strong personality” as a hallmark of success, questioning whether there can be a common ground between cultural and philosophical traditions so diametrically opposed in this regard. But Ricard, once again, meets the problem with semantic lucidity that melts away the apparent conflict:

If by personality you mean exacerbation of the ego, simply to have a strong personality seems to me, unfortunately, a highly dubious criterion of success. Hitler and Mao Tse-tung had very strong personalities.

Illustration by André François from 'Little Boy Brown' by Isobel Harris. Click image for more.

Echoing Bertrand Russell’s famous assertion that “construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult… and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it,” Ricard adds:

It’s important not to confuse strong individuality and strength of mind. The great teachers I’ve been able to meet had indomitable strength of mind. You could say they had very impressive personalities, and that they radiated a sort of natural strength that everyone who met them could perceive. But the big difference was that you couldn’t find the slightest trace of ego in them. I mean the kind of ego that inspires selfishness and self-centeredness. Their strength of mind came from knowledge, serenity, and inner freedom that were outwardly manifested as an unshakable certainty. They were worlds apart from Hitler, Mao Tse-tung and the like, whose powerful personalities arose from an unbridled desire to dominate, and from pride, greed, or hatred. In both cases, we’re faced with immense power, but in the first that power is a flow of constructive altruism, while in the second it’s negative and destructive.

The Monk and the Philosopher is a remarkable read in its totality, addressing with enormous depth and dimension such aspects of the human experience as happiness, suffering, education, ethics, and love. Complement it with D.T. Suzuki on how Zen can help us cultivate our character and Jack Kerouac’s Zen-inspired meditation on the self illusion and “the golden eternity,” then revisit Albert Einstein and the Indian philosopher Tagore’s historic conversation entwining Eastern and Western perspectives with great mutual curiosity and goodwill.

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The Power of Unconditional Love: How Oliver Sacks’s Beloved Aunt Shaped His Life and Inspired His Courageous Dance with Death

“I shall hope against hope that you may weather this misery, and be restored again to the joy of full living.”

The history of creative culture is strewn with silent supporters whose unconditional love and encouragement have carried artists and thinkers to greatness. Although practical help can be enormously vitalizing — without the patronage of Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky may have never become Tchaikovsky; without the man who helped him quit his soul-sucking day-job to become a full-time writer, Bukowski may have died a postal worker — it is spiritual support that best sustains the creative spirit: What would young James Joyce have been without Ibsen or Maurice Sendak without Ursula Nordstrom or Albert Camus without his childhood teacher or Beckett without his one true believer?

One of the most touching testaments to this nourishing power of unconditional support comes from Oliver Sacks and his relationship with his aunt Lennie, which Dr. Sacks recounts with great affection in On the Move: A Life (public library) — his magnificent memoir of love, lunacy, and a life well lived, one of the most moving books I have ever read.

Lennie (Courtesy of Oliver Sacks)

Lennie, born Helena Penina Landau in 1892, was one of his mother’s six sisters and the founder of London’s poetically named Jewish Fresh Air School for Delicate Children. “Delicate,” as Dr. Sacks explains, could refer to “anything from autism to asthma or simply ‘nerviness'” — but the school’s focus bespoke, most of all, Lennie’s keen sensitivity to difference and to children’s anguishing consciousness of being different, whatever the degree or direction of difference.

In that sense, young Oliver was certainly a “delicate” child, and a “delicate” young man, and it was Lennie’s unflinching support that carried him forward — toward becoming a writer and, above all, toward becoming himself. Where his mother had summarily rejected him, proclaiming that he was “an abomination” for being gay, Lennie accepted him unconditionally and enveloped him in her wholehearted love. Dr. Sacks writes:

I felt very loved by her, and I loved her intensely too, and this was a love without ambivalence, without conditionality. Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart.

Although Lennie had been close with his mother throughout Oliver’s childhood, it wasn’t until he moved to Canada and they were separated by an ocean that his own closeness with Lennie — who was exactly forty years his senior — began to blossom through their frequent and sincere correspondence. She addressed his letters “Darling Bol,” and occasionally “Boliver,” which Dr. Sacks contrasts with his parents’ more formal and somber “Dear Oliver,” adding:

I did not feel she used the word “Darling” lightly.

Lennie — a woman who paid generous and loving attention to the world, noticing and noting the blooming almond trees outside her window — was also the first person in Dr. Sacks’s life to encourage his foray into writing, the very vocation he came to see as a pillar of his identity. (“I am a storyteller, for better and for worse,” he reflects in the closing pages of his autobiography, leaving no ambiguity as to his sense of purpose.) He recounts Lennie’s emboldening faith in his creative destiny:

She had felt, since my boyhood days, that I could and should be “a writer.”

So when Dr. Sacks made his first tentative steps into professional journalism in the 1960s, writing for a short-lived magazine called Seed, Lennie cheered on:

I am much enjoying Seed and like its whole format — the cover design, the luxurious paper, the lovely print, and the feeling for words that all you contributors have, whether grave or gay. . . . Will you be dismayed when I say how gloriously young (and of course vital) you all are.

In another letter, she further fertilized the spouting seed of the writing life:

You certainly seem to have found a more satisfying outlet for your restless and searching spirit. . . . I do miss you.

Eventually, 27-year-old Oliver sent her a number of pages from his travel journals, which he considered his first “pieces” — “self-conscious and precious in tone” but ones he hoped to publish one day. Lennie responded:

I received your amazing excerpts from your journals. I found the whole thing breathtaking. I was suddenly conscious that I was gasping physically.

When Dr. Sacks sank into a depression, Lennie was once again his steadfast support, writing in a letter:

You’ve got so much in your favour — brains, charm, presentability, a sense of the ridiculous, and a whole gaggle of us who believe in you.

But for Dr. Sacks, she was a gaggle of one, the nourishing power of her faith in him a potent source of spiritual vitality:

Len’s belief in me had been important since my earliest years, since my parents, I thought, did not believe in me, and I had only a fragile belief in myself.

Under the beams of Lennie’s warming love, that fragile belief was fortified into a lifelong dedication to writing. A few years later, Dr. Sacks published his first book, Migraine, followed by the now-legendary Awakenings, which was eventually adapted into the famous film of the same title starring Robin Williams as Dr. Sacks.

Dr. Sacks on the set of the cinematic adaptation of his book Awakenings, with Robin Williams, 1989 (Courtesy of Oliver Sacks)

But it was Lennie’s exit from Dr. Sacks’s life that provided at least as vital an influence as her supportive presence.

When 86-year-old Lennie was admitted to the hospital for a simple operation, something went terribly wrong and she awoke hooked to an IV. Dr. Sacks writes:

When Lennie learned of this, she felt that life with intravenous nourishment and a spreading cancer was not worthwhile. She resolved to stop eating, though she would take water. My father insisted she be seen by a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist said, “She is the sanest person I have ever seen. You must respect her decision.”

I flew to England as soon as I heard about this and spent many happy but infinitely sad days at Lennie’s bedside as she was growing weaker. She was always and totally herself despite physical weakness.

What a stark contrast this offers with Dr. Sacks’s earliest experience of losing a loved one — the death of his first great love from cancer at a young age was felt as a rupture, with a heartbreaking sense of absence, whereas his final days with Lennie were filled with a deep sense of communion and wholehearted presence.

I am reminded, too, of Albert Camus, who famously asserted that the decision whether to live or whether to die is the most important question of philosophy. But a more important question, perhaps — one at the heart of Lennie’s choice — is how to live and how to die.

Dr. Sacks captures this beautifully in his final letter to her from the end of 1978 — a letter he never knew if she read:

Dearest Len,

We have all of us been hoping so intensely that this month would see your return to health; but, alas! this was not to be.

My heart is torn when I hear of your weakness, your misery — and, now, your longing to die. You, who have always loved life, and been such a source of strength and life to so many, can face death, even choose it, with serenity and courage, mixed, of course, with the grief of all passing. We, I, can much less bear the thought of losing you. You have been as dear to me as anyone in this world.

I shall hope against hope that you may weather this misery, and be restored again to the joy of full living. But if this is not to be, I must thank you — thank you, once again, and for the last time, for living — for being you.

Love, Oliver

Dr. Sacks on his new 250cc Norton motorbike in 1956 (Photograph: Charles Cohen)

Suddenly, a luminous thread reveals itself between Lennie’s courageous exit from life and Dr. Sacks’s own. “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me,” he wrote in his breath-stopping farewell to the world as he confronted his own terminal cancer diagnosis. “I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can… I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

As I reread and reread On the Move, hoping against hope that Dr. Sacks weathers mortality, I find myself filled with a profound sense of gratefulness for all that he has given us, for the innumerable ways in which he was elevated and illuminated our world, for everything that he is. And my soul echoes: “Thank you, once again, and for the last time, for living — for being you.”

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