Momenteel lees ik On the move, de autobiografie van neuroloog Oliver Sacks (1933 – 2015). Er staat een schitterende foto in van Sacks in Amsterdam die wat mij betreft het plezier van schrijven samenvat:
Alles uit je handen laten vallen om iets op te schrijven. Wat een heerlijke gulzige levenshouding.
Ik keek ook deze korte video waarin Sacks over schrijven vertelt:
Dit is het transcript, met een geweldige laatste alinea over schrijfplezier:
A vast amount of writing has gone into my clinical notes and for many years, with a population of 500 patients at Beth Abraham, 300 residents in the Little Sisters’ Homes, and thousands of patients in and out of Bronx State Hospital, I wrote well over 1,000 notes a year for many decades.
And I enjoyed this.
My notes were lengthy and detailed, and they sometimes read, others said, like novels.
I am a storyteller, for better and for 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.
The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other.
It takes me to another place, whatever my subject, where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time.
In these rare heavenly states of mind, I may write non-stop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.
Over a lifetime I’ve written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh and as much fun as when I started it nearly 70 years ago.
Oliver Sacks – On Writing
Als ik Sacks autobiografie uit heb, schrijf ik uiteraard een bespreking voor deze site.