“Though I revere good writing and art and music, it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass,” he writes. After bemoaning the erosion of Earth’s climate and humanity’s collective memory and interaction, he offers a glimpse into his almost impossibly tender heart. Switching gears from curmudgeonly to hopeful, Sacks wrests some ray of light from the darkness of his physical demise. In “Life Continues,” for example, Sacks gives an up-close and personal account of his own mortality, presumably as he grapples with the cancer that would eventually claim his life, and of his dismay over the death of privacy and intimate human contact in the modern age of smartphones and social media. And their itches will no doubt be scratched.
“Although it was written a hundred years ago, ‘A Lunar Morning’ has the freshness of a new dawn, and it remains for me, as when I first read it, the most poetic evocation of how it may be when, finally, we encounter alien life.”įans of Sacks’s writing will likely gravitate towards the previously unpublished works collected in Everything. “For myself, since I cannot wait, I turn to science fiction on occasion-and, not least, back to my favorite Wells,” he writes. In “Anybody Out There?” he waxes literary on the topic of astrobiology, rooting his thoughts on the search for life beyond Earth in his love of books. Sacks, as ever, does not shy away from musings on areas of science outside his own neuroscientific realm of expertise. And within each of these broader sections, the pieces rhythmically shift from longer introspections to brief and punchy vignettes. The collection of essays, book reviews, and memoirish tales truly puts everything in its place by dividing the works into three main sections-“First Loves,” “Clinical Tales,” and “Life Continues”-that trifurcate Sacks’s life into its three major epochs. Beyond Sacks’s characteristically engaging writing, the pacing and layout of the book, which includes pieces originally published in various magazines and some unpublished works, speak to its title.
0 kommentar(er)
