![]() ![]() ![]() Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.Įlements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. Last night I dreamed about mercury - huge, shining globules of quicksilver rising and falling. In the first essay, titled “Mercury,” he follows in the footsteps of Henry Miller, who considered the measure of a life well lived upon turning eighty three decades earlier. Sacks reflected on his unusual existential adventure and his courageous dance with death in a series of lyrical New York Times essays, posthumously published in the slim yet enormously enchanting book Gratitude ( public library), edited by his friend and assistant of thirty years, Kate Edgar, and his partner, the writer and photographer Bill Hayes. ![]() 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 Oliver Sacks (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 fully lived life. “Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts,” proclaimed a 1924 guide to the art of living. ![]()
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