The Saunterer

Oliver Sacks on the joy of swimming

    About swimming, Oliver Sacks wrote in Everything in Its Place:

    We were all water babies, my brothers and I. Our father, who was a swimming champ (he won the fifteen-mile race off the Isle of Wight three years in succession) and loved swimming more than anything else, introduced each of us to the water when we were scarcely a week old.

    Swimming gave me a sort of joy, a sense of well-being so extreme that it becomes at times a sort of ecstasy. . . .  The mind can float free, become spellbound, in a state like a trance. I have never known anything so powerfully, so healthily euphoriant--and I am addicted to it, fretful when I cannot swim.

    My father called swimming "the elixir of life," and certainly it seemed to be so for him: he swam daily, slowing down only with time until the grand age of ninety-four.

    (Quoted from page 4 of the June 2, 2019, issue The New York Review of Books.)

    For a brief biography of Oliver Sacks, click here.

    

Doris Day on the value of our pets

From her obituary in the May 14, 2019, issue of The New York Times is her observation:

    During the painful and bleak periods I've suffered through these past years, my animal family has been a source of joy and strength to me. I have found that when you are deeply troubled, there are things you get from the silent, devoted companionship of your pets that you can get from no other source.

    I have never found in a human being loyalty comparable to that of any pet.