Christopher Isherwood starts his Berlin Diary with an extended photographic simile: 'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.' But we deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it, know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making-but we are, equally, its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours-our forms (as Proust says) are outlined in each one, even if we have no existence, no reality, other than this.
—Oliver Sacks
—Oliver Sacks
Monday, July 11, 2016