Para ser nosotros mismos hemos de tenernos a nosotros mismos, hemos de poseer, de reposeer si es preciso, nuestras historias biográficas. Hemos de <> nosotros mismos el drama interior, la narración, l...
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finishe...
Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others.
Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer—everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but...
My favourite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals – my old and valued friends – Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum,...
Michael was all too conscious of his condition, and when he was in his grimmest moods, he would say, I am a doomed man, though there was a hint of the messianic in this too: he was doomed as all messi...
Many patients may confess that they feel strange or confused during a migraine aura, that they are clumsy in their movements, or that they would not drive at such a time. In short, they may be aware o...
Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.
Leonard L., speaking for them all, wrote at the end of his autobiography: ‘I am a living candle. I am consumed that you may learn. New things will be seen in the light of my suffering.
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
It is often felt that Darwin, more than anyone, banished meaning from the world—in the sense of any overall divine meaning or purpose. There is indeed no design, no plan, no blueprint in Darwin’s worl...
It is making severe demands on the unity of the personality to try and make me identify myself with the author of the paper on the spinal ganglia of the Petromyzon. Nevertheless it does seem to be the...
I sought for (and sometimes achieved) an intense concentration, a complete absorption in the worlds of mineralogy and chemistry and physics, in science – focusing on them, holding myself together in t...
I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive. I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with (in Clifford Geertz’s phrase) thi...
I have found it oddly difficult to get a clear answer—as it may be difficult, sometimes, to get a dreamer to tell you how he dreams. He is given to understand something, in the course of his dream, bu...
I had been to Amsterdam a couple of times with Eric; we loved the museums and the Concertgebouw (it was here that I first heard Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, in Dutch). We loved the canals lined wi...
I feel glad to be alive—I’m glad I’m not dead! sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect.
I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays. Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams prize—£50! I had never had so much money at once. This time I wen...
He has achieved what Nietzsche liked to call ‘The Great Health’—rare humour, valour, and resilience of spirit: despite being, or because he is, afflicted with Tourette’s.
He died at home in his library, surrounded by the books he loved.