Bryan Appleyard
Look Hear
Oliver Sacks has been telling us some of the strangest stories in the world for forty years now. A neurologist, he writes of the ways in which the human brain both invents and perceives the world. He does so through endless anecdotes, told in an unadorned, attractive style. He draws no conclusions; his aim is to ask questions.
The big one in this book is: ‘To what extent are we the authors, the creators, of our own experiences?’
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3