By What a magnificent book Oliver Sacks’ On The Move is, and how fitting that after almost four hundred pages about his life and his writing, Sacks ends in the present tense. We can almost trick ourselves that he is still alive, still writing, still absorbed in all his far-ranging explorations of how the mind works and doesn’t work. And that after it all, he is someone who simply tells stories: “I am a storyteller, for better or worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
I need to write more about On The Move, but I myself will be on the move: in a few hours I will be leaving on an epic trip to Europe with my grown-up kids and my husband, the first time we will all be together on a trip abroad. And so I will be away from posting for a while, but I won’t be away from reading. Besides a French-English dictionary which I intend to consult fairly regularly, I have some Joan Didion and Meghan Daum in my backpack. I’m going off road here, deviating from my list of ten, so I should have some interesting things to write about when I come back.
I hope everybody is surviving the summer heat, and that reading is helping all to stay cool. I will have more soon!
Open Arts Spring 2023 
Wow I didn’t realize poor Oliver’s head would be chopped off….!
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Bon Voyage, my friend Nadia! Have a wonderful trip. We are sitting in Brussels at an airport hotel as our flight back home was delayed until Saturday–
Enjoy your time with the family– sounds like a wonderful opportunity!
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PS- I love Oliver Sacks!
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Bah! I have to admit I’m a little jealous! I’ve been busy juggling several jobs this summer, one of which a summer camp that ended just yesterday. Hopefully now I will have time for at best a day at the beach, but no European excursions for me…not for awhile anyway. When I was in France I fell in love with rose flavored everything-jam, ice cream, candied rose petals…ENJOY!
I agree, people enjoy/need a narrative…and of course my understanding of this goes back to art! During the modernist movement, artists wanted to create work that was universal, that anyone who hasn’t studied art would be able to view and appreciate, to break from the heavily entrenched iconography of the past that only a scholar would understand the intricacies…and ironically now…Modern Art (Clement Greenberg Modernism) is what the general public least understands/appreciates.
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