Temple is an intensely moral creature. She has a passionate sense of right and wrong, for example, in regard to the treatment of animals; and law, fo… - Oliver Sacks

I never heard [my parents] talk between themselves about Palestine or Zionism, and I suspected they had no strong convictions on the subject, at least until after the war, when the horror of the Holocaust made them feel there should be a “National Home.” I felt they were bullied by the organizers of these meetings, and by the gangsterlike evangelists who would pound at the front door and demand large sums for yeshivas or “schools in Israel.” My parents, clearheaded and independent in most other ways, seemed to become soft and helpless in the face of these demands, perhaps driven by a sense of obligation or anxiety. My own feelings […] were passionately negative: I came to hate Zionism and evangelism and politicking of every sort, which I regarded as noisy and intrusive and bullying.

While autism is a developmental disorder, sometimes a devastating one, there is always within the autism a unique and sometimes strangely gifted individual. The great psychoanalyst Winicott used to feel that there was something like a tulip in every person and this was their essence and that this internal part of them was inaccessible to the person themselves and should not be meddled with or touched by psychoanalysis or anything else and one wonders if there is not some autistic essence like this tulip which needs to be respected and not meddled with.

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.