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 over-all 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 that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings. We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
You can find this passage in Oliver Sack’s great book — Hallucinations.
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Thank you. I had the honor and privilege of being Oliver's editor at The New York Times in 2015, for his four end-of-life essays, up to two weeks before his death. I came away from that experience changed in some way. It's good to be reminded that he was much more than what people think of when they think of doctors -- he was a poet, philosopher, seeker and muse as well.
I appreciate your literary selections. They frequently resonate to thoughts and feelings that surprise me and represent a part of me I have not fully cherished, much less enacted.