I took many pictures of Oliver Sacks during our life together — and not just because I adored him. He was an irresistible subject for a photographer, with his bushy beard, sparkling bespectacled eyes, expressive hands, gaptoothed smile and the athletic build of someone who could easily swim long distances, even into his 80s.

The last picture I took of him, however, captures something quite different. His eyes do not meet mine, his head rests on a propped hand, and he is completely absorbed in a Bach piece he’d been learning to play.

I made a print and showed it to him a couple of days later. He didn’t find it especially flattering, but he liked it. It reminded him of the engraving of an elderly Beethoven in the “Oxford Companion to Music” from 1938. He knew that book practically by heart — a favorite aunt had given it to him as a boy — and he could describe the illustration and its caption with perfect recall: Beethoven’s room is “untidy,” he told me, “and there sits the aged composer, ‘very ill, but indomitable.’ ”

I nodded, his words echoing in my head: very ill, but indomitable — yes.

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Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1919 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art

I SLIPPED away from work on a recent Monday to take my two nieces to the Garry Winogrand photography exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I doubt there’s a better way to play hooky in New York right now.

When you go — not if, but when (and soon, by the way; the show closes Sept. 21) — I suggest you bring a thesaurus. Because it wasn’t long before we found words failing us. An image of an acrobat caught midleap on a Manhattan street, for instance, struck the three of us as the epitome of “amazing.” So did another photo. Then another. Upon seeing the first few dozen of the more than 175 prints on view we pledged that we would not use that word to describe every single photo. Beautiful, incredible, joyful, strange, very sad — we made it as far as the second room before we were back to the A’s.

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(Originally published in the NY Times)

I started writing this essay five years ago, and then I stopped. That I was not able to finish the piece did not strike me at the time as ironic but as further proof that whatever I once had in me — juice, talent, will — was gone. In any case, completing it would have made moot the very point I was attempting to make: Not writing can be good for one’s writing; indeed, it can make one a better writer.

I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep: It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out. Nor did I feel blocked at first. Lines would come to me then slip away, like a dog that loses interest in how you are petting it and seeks another hand. This goes both ways. When I lost interest in them, the lines gradually stopped coming. Before I knew it, two years had passed with scarcely a word.

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Illustration: Oscar Bolton Green

MY 30-year-long subscription to The New Yorker ran out a few months ago — pure absent-mindedness on my part — and since then I buy a copy each week at the smoke shop around the corner from my apartment.

It makes no sense financially. I could save 73 percent off the cover price if I renewed for just a year; even more for two. But I’ve found I enjoy the benefits that come with my $6.99 a week, beginning with Ali, the shop’s manager.

Ali had formerly known me as a customer who occasionally came in late at night for a single vanilla Häagen-Dazs bar and asked for a book of matches. The asking part is important. He once told me about a customer who reached over the counter for a book of matches from the box next to the register:

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(Originally published in the NY Times) Illustration by Cun Shi

I got hacked.

I say “I”; it was my email account, but it felt — feels still — deeply personal. It started on a Tuesday at exactly 7:20 a.m. E.S.T. I know because I received a text message at that time saying that my email password had just been changed. If I had made this change, I need not “take any action.” But if not, “click this link.”

I was bleary, jet-lag weary, having returned the night before from 10 days’ traveling in Europe, but I was quite sure I had changed nothing but my sheets since getting home. Right then, a message from a friend popped up on my Facebook page delivering the news that something was amiss: “Just received a strange email from you asking for money. Change your password.”

It was already too late.

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Illustration: Luca Zamoc

WHEN the news broke recently that a team of Belgian scientists had “discovered” a new body part — a ligament located just outside the knee — the first place my mind went was to Padua.

Padua is the small city in northern Italy where the 16th-century Brussels-born scientist Andreas Vesalius taught anatomy and created his history-making masterpiece, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (“On the Fabric of the Human Body”), published in 1543. The old man would have been delighted by the news, I couldn’t help thinking.

Vesalius’s wasn’t the first book on anatomy, but it was the first detailed study based entirely on actual dissection of human cadavers — on scientific fact, not supposition. It systematically dismantled the error-filled doctrine of Galenism, which rested in part on animal rather than human anatomy and had held sway for 14 centuries. But in mapping the inner body, Vesalius didn’t get everything right.

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Illustration: Rebecca Mock

SOMEONE asked me the other day how I had gotten over the sudden death of someone I loved. What I wanted to say but found myself unable to explain (for it would have sounded too strange) was that I learned a good deal about moving through grief from some trees I once knew. They were not my trees. I didn’t plant them. I lived in an apartment surrounded by them. The only tending done was to give them my full attention over the course of four seasons.

When I moved in it was April, still cold, and the branches were bare. Facing northeast, my view of Manhattan was unobstructed, seen through a latticework veil. There were five trees, each distinct. They were not beautiful. My next-door neighbor, a landscape designer, told me that the species, Ailanthus altissima, is an urban weed. But I never expected beauty. That they were tall and strong and present was enough. I found that Ailanthus derives from an Indonesian word meaning “tree of heaven.”

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