Gratitude

Gratitude is not an illness narrative. Sacks scarcely mentions the cancer treatment he received over the preceding decade; there is no railing against infirmity, no detailed account of pain or suffering [citation:17]. Instead, the book's stance is one of detachment and gratitude. Sacks writes that he cannot pretend he is without fear, but that his predominant feeling is gratitude: for having loved and been loved, for having read and traveled and thought and written, and above all for having been 'a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet' [citation:7]. The essays are less about dying than about how to live the remaining months in the richest way possible.

Sacks explicitly modeled his central essay on Hume's 'My Own Life,' written when the philosopher learned of his terminal illness. Hume wrote that he had 'never suffered a moment's abatement of my spirits' and possessed 'the same ardour as ever in study' [citation:7]. Sacks quotes Hume and echoes his detachment, writing that one line from Hume 'strikes me as especially true'—that it is difficult to be more detached from life than at present [citation:7]. The Spectator review noted that Sacks paid tribute to his favourite philosopher by adopting the same title, and that the charge of vanity, familiar to Hume, was also not unfamiliar to Sacks [citation:17]. The Humean model gave Sacks a template for a funeral oration of the self that avoids self-pity.

The essay 'My Periodic Table' returns to the passion first chronicled in Uncle Tungsten: Sacks's childhood obsession with chemical elements. He describes how, facing death, he surrounded himself once again with metals and minerals—'little emblems of eternity' [citation:1]. The elements offered a world 'where there is no life, but also no death,' a refuge he had turned to during times of stress throughout his life [citation:1]. A SciELO review observed that Sacks related the elements to his anniversaries, noting their atomic numbers, and that his first decade saw the periodic table become 'my companions' [citation:13]. The return to chemistry in his final months is a return to a source of order and beauty that predated his medical career.

Gratitude is a very short book—45 pages in the Knopf edition—comprising four essays originally published in The New York Times over the two years before Sacks's death in August 2015 [citation:12][citation:17]. The essays are 'Mercury,' 'My Own Life,' 'My Periodic Table,' and 'Sabbath' [citation:20]. A Medicina y Ética review noted that while the essays were written and published at different times, 'the selection of the same achieves a theme unity over the worries not exclusive of a physician, but by every man: death' [citation:10]. The brevity and occasional nature mean the book functions as a coda or farewell rather than a comprehensive final statement. The Spectator noted the original title of the first essay was more playful—'The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding)'—and its revision hints at a 'regrettable smoothing' of Sacks's eccentric legacy [citation:17].

The final essay, 'Sabbath,' finds Sacks thinking about a deep-rooted Jewish tradition despite having separated from formal religious practice at eighteen [citation:13]. He describes the Sabbath as the feeling that one's work is done and that, with a clean conscience, one can rest [citation:13]. The essay is not a return to religious observance but an embrace of a cultural and psychological inheritance: a sense of completion, of having finished what one was given to do. A SciELO review noted that the essay discovers Sacks thinking about the Sabbath 'when you have the feeling that your job is done and that, with a clean conscience, you can rest' [citation:13]. It is a secular reading of a sacred concept, fitting for a writer who found meaning in both science and tradition.

Gratitude circles back to themes first explored in Uncle Tungsten (2001), Sacks's memoir of his chemical boyhood. The essay 'My Periodic Table' explicitly revisits that material, describing how the elements became companions and how, facing death, he surrounded himself again with metals and minerals [citation:1]. A phenomenological study of Sacks's life-course narratives treats Uncle Tungsten and Gratitude together, analyzing both as accounts of embodied perception and the self's relation to the material world [citation:8]. Where Uncle Tungsten is a full autobiography of a scientific childhood, Gratitude is a compressed farewell that returns to those early sources of meaning. The two books form a bracket around Sacks's career: the origin of his passion and its final consolation.