| Op-Ed Contributor |NYT Now
My Own Life
By OLIVER SACKSFEB. 19, 2015
A MONTH ago, I felt that I was
in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my
luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in
the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye,
an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor
ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors
metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.
I feel grateful that I have
been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original
diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of
my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer
cannot be halted.
It is up to me now to choose
how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest,
deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one
of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was
mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of
1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”
“I now reckon upon a speedy
dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and
what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person,
never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as
ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”
I have been lucky enough to
live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and
five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published
five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages)
to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.
Hume continued, “I am ... a man
of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful
humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great
moderation in all my passions.”
Here I depart from Hume. While
I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities,
I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild
dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent
enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
And yet, one line from Hume’s
essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more
detached from life than I am at present.”
Over the last few days, 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. This does not mean I
am finished with life.
On the contrary, I feel
intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my
friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I
have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
The image that came to my mind
from reading this is how a log put on a fire often flares up before the fire
burns more steadily from within...
Dr. Sacks, as a long-time
reader of your life's works, this admission by you of your own mortality and
the grace with which you wish to...
person, but have pondered much
about what the appeal of religion carries for others...life after death seems
to be one...
This will involve audacity,
clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world.
But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).
I feel a sudden clear focus and
perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself,
my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I
shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global
warming.
This is not indifference but
detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming,
about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to
the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who
biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
I have been increasingly
conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My
generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a
tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone,
but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot
be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the
genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to
find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
I cannot pretend I am without
fear. But my predominant feeling is one of 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. I have had an intercourse with the world,
the special intercourse of writers and readers.
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.
Oliver Sacks, a professor of
neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, is the author of many
books, including “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”