{"id":9303,"date":"2024-11-09T19:30:26","date_gmt":"2024-11-09T23:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/oliver-sacks-on-despair-and-the-meaning-of-life-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-11-09T19:30:26","modified_gmt":"2024-11-09T23:30:26","slug":"oliver-sacks-on-despair-and-the-meaning-of-life-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/oliver-sacks-on-despair-and-the-meaning-of-life-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Oliver<\/a><\/p>\n

Meaning is not something we find \u2014 it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. \u201cThere is no love of life without despair of life,\u201d Albert Camus wrote<\/a> between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process \u2014 a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair, when life as we know it has ceased to make sense and we must derive for ourselves<\/a> not only what makes it livable but what makes it worth living. Those are clarifying times, sanctifying times, when the simulacra of meaning we have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our culture \u2014 God and money, the family unit and perfect teeth \u2014 fall away to reveal the naked soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone. <\/p>\n

The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks<\/a> (July 9, 1933\u2013August 30, 2015) \u2014 who thought with uncommon rigor and compassion about what it means to be human and all the different ways of being and remaining human no matter how our minds may fray \u2014 takes up this question of life\u2019s meaning in one of his magnificent collected Letters<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"\"
Oliver Sacks by his partner, Bill Hayes<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his fifty-seventh year, Sacks reached out to the philosopher Hugh S. Moorhead in response to his anthology of reflections on the meaning of life by some of the twentieth century\u2019s greatest writers and thinkers. (Three years later, LIFE<\/em> magazine would plagiarize Moorhead\u2019s concept in an anthology of their own<\/a>, even taking the same title.) Sacks \u2014 a self-described \u201csort of atheist (curious, sometimes wistful, often indifferent, never militant)\u201d \u2014 offers his own perspective:<\/p>\n

\n

I envy those who are able to find meanings \u2014 above all, ultimate meanings \u2014 from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to \u201cbelieve\u201d and \u201cbelong.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I do not find, for myself, that any steady sense of \u201cmeaning\u201d can be provided by any cultural institution, or any religion, or any philosophy, or (what might be called) a dully \u201cmaterialistic\u201d Science. I am excited by a different vision of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order as the \u201ccenter\u201d of the universe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is in this 1990 letter that Sacks began germinating the seeds of the personal credo that would come abloom in his poignant deathbed reflection on the measure of living and the dignity of dying<\/a> thirty-five years later. He tells Moorhead:<\/p>\n

\n

I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life\u2019s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or \u201cremember\u201d) it when I am \u201cinspired\u201d by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History. <\/p>\n

I do not believe in, never have believed in, any \u201ctranscendental\u201d spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to \u201cexplain\u201d life, give it \u201cmeaning.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nine years later, in a different letter to Stephen Jay Gould<\/a>, he would take issue with the idea that there are two \u201cmagisteria\u201d \u2014 two different realms of reality, one natural and one supernatural \u2014 writing:<\/p>\n

\n

Talk of \u201cparapsychology\u201d and astrology and ghosts and spirits infuriates me, with their implication of \u201canother,\u201d as-it-were parallel world. But when I read poetry, or listen to Mozart, or see selfless acts, I do, of course feel a \u201chigher\u201d domain (but one which Nature reaches up to, not separate in nature).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Ariana Fields from What Love Knows<\/em><\/a> by poet Aracelis Girmay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A century and a half earlier, his beloved Darwin had articulated a similar sentiment in contemplating the spirituality of nature<\/a> after docking the Beagle<\/em> in Chile, as had Whitman in contemplating the meaning of life<\/a> in the wake of a paralytic stroke \u2014 exactly the kind of physiological and neurological disordering Sacks studied with such passion and compassion for what keeps despair at bay, what keeps life meaningful, when the mind \u2014 that meeting place of the body and the spirit \u2014 comes undone. At the heart of his letter to Moorhead is the recognition that there is something wider than thought, deeper than belief, that animates our lives:<\/p>\n

\n

When moods of defeat, despair, accidie<\/em> and \u201cSo-what-ness\u201d visit me (they are not infrequent!), I find a sense of hope and meaning in my patients, who do not give up despite devastating disease. If they<\/em> who are so ill, so without the usual strengths and supports and hopes, if they can be affirmative \u2014 there must be something to affirm, and an inextinguishable power of affirmation within\u00a0us. <\/p>\n

I think \u201cthe meaning of life\u201d is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us<\/em>\u2026 It clearly has to do with love \u2014 what and whom and how one can love.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As if to remind us that the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which means that we may only be here to learn how to love<\/a>, he adds:<\/p>\n

\n

I do not think that love is \u201cjust an emotion,\u201d but that it is constitutive in our whole mental structure (and, therefore, in the development of our brains).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement this small fragment of Oliver Sacks\u2019s wide and wonderful Letters<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Rachel Carson on the meaning of life<\/a>, Loren Eiseley on its first and final truth<\/a>, and Mary Shelley \u2014 having lost her mother at birth, having lost three of her own children, her only sister, and the love of her life before the end of her twenties \u2014 on what makes life worth living<\/a>, then revisit Oliver Sacks (writing 30 years before ChatGPT) on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning<\/a> and his timely long-ago reflection on how to save humanity from itself<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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