(der Wert eines gut gelebten Lebens, wenn man achtzig wird)
Ich habe mich gefreut, als ich diesen Text auf Facebook entdeckt habe. Wie ein Geburtstagsgeschenk, denn am Montag werde ich 80 Jahre alt und finde es wunderbar. Es ist lustig, dass Oliver Sacks genau das bedauert, was ich ausgiebig gemacht habe: scheu gewesen zu sein, nicht andere Sprachen gelernt und auch nicht in anderen Kulturen gelebt zu haben.
Genau das habe ich gemacht: ich war nie scheu – aber das war kein Verdienst; ich habe viele Sprachen gelernt: Englisch, Französisch, Italienisch, Chinesisch und nun Niederländisch. Das waren und sind wunderschöne Anstrengungen. Und ich habe in unterschiedlichen Kulturen gewohnt und gelebt. Das waren Erfahrungen mit Höhen und Tiefen – allerdings nie grenzwertig.
Hier nun Oliver Sacks: the measure of a life well lived upon turning eighty
“Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts,” proclaimed a 1924 guide to the art of living. That one of the greatest scientists of our time should be one of our greatest teacher in that art is nothing short of a blessing for which we can only be grateful — and that’s precisely what Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), a Copernicus of the mind and a Dante of medicine who turned the case study into a poetic form, became over the course of his long and fully lived life.
In his final months, Dr. Sacks reflected on his unusual existential adventure and his courageous dance with death in a series of lyrical New York Times essays…
In the first essay, titled “Mercury,” he follows in the footsteps of Henry Miller, who considered the measure of a life well lived upon turning eighty three decades earlier. Dr. Sacks writes:
Last night I dreamed about mercury — huge, shining globules of quicksilver rising and falling. Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.
Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. At 11, I could say “I am sodium” (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.
[…]
Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.
Having almost died at forty-one while being chased by a white bull in a Norwegian fjord, Dr. Sacks considers the peculiar grace of having lived to old age:
At nearly 80, … , 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 grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world.”
I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.
But pushing up from beneath the wistful self-awareness is Dr. Sacks’s fundamental buoyancy of spirit. Echoing George Eliot on the life-cycle of happiness and Thoreau on the greatest gift of growing older, he writes:
My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together. (kopiert aus dem facebook account www.brainpickings.org)
Was für ein wohltuender zusammenfassender Rückblick. Musste ich etwas endure = erleiden, aushalten, überstehen? Richtig schlimm war nur der Anfang meines Lebens: 1939 war der Beginn des 2. Weltkrieges. Bis zum 6. Lebensjahr musste ich oft in den Keller und habe unzählige Male nach dem Bombenalarm gesehen, wie anstelle eines Gebäudes plötzlich erschreckend freier Raum „in den Himmel ragte“. Aber ich habe gedacht, dass das hier unten auf der Erde so ist, keine Ausnahme, sondern der Normalfall. Wie angenehm, dass das immer besser wurde. Ich bin für alle meine Jahre sehr dankbar!
