“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for
human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning,
understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives.
We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the
illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and
microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow
us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need
detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.”—
British
neurologist, naturalist, historian of science Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), Hallucinations
(2012)
The image accompanying this post of Dr. Oliver Sacks
was taken in 1985 by Bernard Gotfryd and is part of his collection at the
Library of Congress.
No comments:
Post a Comment