Oliver Sacks bids us all goodbye

[JimC]

So, you don't personally hold some things more important than others? Somehow I don't believe that. I'm philosophically a nihilist, but even I hold some things personally more important than others.

Perhaps mm has a point then, of somehow distinguishing between "personally important" and "important to all sentient creatures in the entire universe"

[mistermack]

So, you don't personally hold some things more important than others? Somehow I don't believe that. I'm philosophically a nihilist, but even I hold some things personally more important than others.

You're not dying though. Not imminently, anyway, I hope.

I know what you mean though. I've paid for my own funeral, even though it doesn't make sense, and I should spend that money on enjoying myself right now. Once I'm dead it doesn't matter who pays or if nobody pays.

But I know I'm being illogical, and realise the pointlessness of life.
I don't think he does. After all, in a thousand years, none of what I do or he does will mean anything at all to anyone. And a thousand years is bugger-all.

I see it as a coping mechanism that we all employ. Pretend that we are immortal, and that stuff matters. It's soothing.

[Hermit]

My life is so insignificant that I may as well never have been born. Not many people are aware of my existence even now. After I will have died a few of my closest relatives will be sad for a little while. The next generation, nephews, nieces and so on, might recognise me on the rare occasion they idly flip through their collection of photos, and the one after that is unlikely to put a name to my visage even if they happen to come across it. After that there will be no reverberation at all that can be identified as coming from me.

And yet - please excuse the soppy expression - I hold some things dear to my heart. It's not anything personally connected with me. I cherish those things because it makes me glad to have been a member of the human race. One of those things is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It demonstrates that humankind is capable of more than wars, genocides, betrayals big and small, for petty ends, mouth-breathing morons and so on. His music transcends mortality. It soars beyond the venal. Almost totally forgotten soon after Bach's death, Wanda Landowska stumbled across its grave 180 years later, exhumed the body and revived it. Actually, it wasn't a body, and she did not revive it, really. Forgotten =/= dead. She just reintroduced us to one of the peaks of human achievement, something that is man made but transcends the individual human and becomes a beacon of what humanity can achieve.

Eventually, nobody will ever hear it again, not even if we don't destroy what we can. Entropy will take care of that. Still, the fact that humans were capable of creating something like The Art of the Fugue will not be unmade, so, all you nihilists, get fucked. You can't take this away from humanity, and to point at the fact that eventually humanity will have disappeared completely and without leaving a trace is not an argument, but reverse hubris.

[piscator]

Spreading a little seed helps with the existential angst, maybe a little of it will end up in some Ubermenchen some time hence... Hard to meet up with mistermack and Achilles' standard of being remembered for a thousand years, but anything gets done with land in certain quadrangles of Alaska, someone will see my work as "Original US Survey by piscator/GLO/BLM"... a permanent structure with my name on it that should last at least as long as the United States. Disgusting, huh?


http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/default.aspx

[JimC]

My legacy is in the minds of those I have taught...

[mistermack]

The thing is, I'm talking about reality, not our current feelings about what we do.
That's a given.
Bach's music wasn't great. It was just something that induced certain feelings in certain simians, for a microscopically short blip in history.
And the same goes for any plaque, or place in a history book, or memories instilled in others. In reality it's meaningless, over any meaningful timescale.

Of course it makes us feel good at the time. That would be my message to Sacks. Do it, if it makes you feel good. But don't imagine that any of it means anything.

[Animavore]

He's gone.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/a ... awakenings

[Hermit]

He's gone.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/a ... awakenings

Maybe he mistook his life for a cat. The latter has nine of them.

[Animavore]

I never even heard of the DeNiro film mentioned which is supposedly based on Sacks's memoirs.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099077/

[cronus]

Some need that work ethic. It gives them meaning. Doing stuff is the same as not doing stuff. Doesn't matter. Matter of personal preference influenced by culture and a nagging mother/wife?

[mistermack]

Some need that work ethic. It gives them meaning. Doing stuff is the same as not doing stuff. Doesn't matter. Matter of personal preference influenced by culture and a nagging mother/wife?

His mother said to him, when she found out he was homosexual, that she wished he'd never been born.
Nice lady. One of the first female surgeons in England, so educated.

But she was jewish. And they expect grandchildren.

I just noticed he suffered from Prosopagnosia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
I've never heard of it before, but I'm sure that's what I've got. I need to meet someone loads of times, before I remember their face.
And even then, I don't recognise people, if I see them somewhere unfamiliar, or if I haven't seen them for a bit.

I even stared right through my own father once, when he was next to me in a pub, where I wasn't expecting him to be.
He never said anything, just ignored me, and I had to ask my mother why he wasn't speaking to me.
She described what happened, and I had a hell of a job convincing him I hadn't seen him.
He thought I ignored him because I was with friends.

[cronus]

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/busi ... 0825101453

About sums it all up...

[Animavore]

When Oliver Sacks was 18, he faced a prospect most young people dread: a belated talk about the birds and the bees with his dad.

“You don’t seem to have many girlfriends,” Sacks wrote his father said in his memoir, “On the Move,” released earlier this year. “Don’t you like girls? … Perhaps you prefer boys?”

Sacks didn’t try to hide.

“Yes I do – but it’s just a feeling – I have never ‘done’ anything,” Sacks told his father.

He pleaded with his father not to tell his mother – but his father did. The news did not go over well — to say the least.

“You are an abomination,” she said. “I wish you had never been born.”

Sacks wrote that his mother’s words had to be understood in the context of the times. Homosexual acts were not decriminalized in England until the 1960s; his mother, he wrote, “had an Orthodox upbringing.” Yet, her denunciation would prove crushing to a young man about to embark on a brilliant career as a neurologist.

“Her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality,” he wrote.

cont. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... sexuality/

[Brian Peacock]

“You are an abomination,” she said. “I wish you had never been born.”

Ah, there's nothing quite like a mother's love.

[mistermack]

“You are an abomination,” she said. “I wish you had never been born.”

Ah, there's nothing quite like a mother's love.

Yeh, and having a father you can trust.