Fountain of Life

Several months ago, on a long car ride, we were fortunate enough to hear a Radiolab podcast about Oliver Sacks. It was a beautiful program centered around recordings that he and his partner Billy had created in the final months before he died. They were often everyday conversations, and somehow the mundanity of the topics discussed made it more poignant than many of the interviews I had previously heard from him.

Oliver Sacks is one of those people that had so many interesting facets to his life that he makes me feel sad that I have not accomplished more in my life. The fact that I need to take someone else's remarkable life accomplishments and turn them around to create petty thoughts about myself speaks volumes, but it is what it is.

His writing was thoughtful and elegant. He took scientific subjects and not only made them accessible to those of us who aren't brilliant neurologists, but he made them engaging. No small feat.

In the podcast, there was mention about his use of fountain pens. Sacks wrote free hand, and in the tapes you can often hear the gentle scratching as he writes. I love to try different pens, and those that write well make me supremely happy. I'd never used a fountain pen, so the next day we found a stationer's store in Boston. In the back of the shop, there was a counter with a huge variety of fountain pens and a wonderfully knowledgeable salesperson. A few minutes later, I was the proud owner of a fountain pen. And then a friend of The Professor's mentioned his own favorite, and I somehow felt the need to pick that one up as well. Now these live with me:

So now that I have two, I think that makes me a collector. The salesperson who sold me the one on the left mentioned fountain pen conventions. I wonder what it says about me that I was immediately intrigued? Probably not very positive things.

I have enjoyed my collection, and expect to expand it soon (there may already be one or two in my Amazon cart, but I can't be sure). I'm also fully anticipating that my writing will be prolific, engaging, and deeply scientific very soon in the near future.