Wilder Penfield, Albert Camus, and Me

The first time I came across the question of a great motivation was in a talk that Wilder Penfield gave to a group of us McGill University students who were interested in his work. Penfield was a great man in medicine in those days, notably for his work on epilepsy and in neurosurgery. 

Wilder Penfield

One of the things he said in his talk was that if he had ever done anything in his life that was worthwhile, “It was because there is a little boy inside me.”

 

There were two other things he said that I well remember: that when he interviewed students who were applying to medical school, he placed a great importance on what they had done during their summers; and also that when he was just starting his study of epilepsy he set himself a goal of knowing all there was to know about epilepsy. He considered this last statement to be a measure of how little he knew about the subject at the time.

That thought about there being a little boy inside him that makes the difference strikes me as exactly right.

Albert Camus came close to that when he wrote that he knew with certainty that our work is a long path to re-find though the detours of art the two or three

Albert Camus

simple and great images on which the heart, a first time, opened itself.

The section in the preface of his “l'Enver et L'Endroit” where he writes this, is worth quoting at a little more length:

Rien ne m’empêche en tout cas de rêver que j’y réussirai, d’imaginer que je mettrai encore au centre de cette œuvre l’admirable silence d’une mère et l’effort d’un homme pour retrouver une justice ou un amour qui équilibre ce silence. Dans le songe de la vie, voici l’homme qui trouve ses vérités et qui les perd, sur la terre de la mort, pour revenir à travers les guerres, les cris, la folie de justice et d’amour, la douleur enfin, vers cette patrie tranquille où la mort même est un silence heureux. Voici encore... Oui, rien n’empêche de rêver, à l’heure même de l’exil, puisque du moins je sais cela, de science certaine, qu’une œuvre d’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce long cheminement pour retrouver par les détours de l’art les deux ou trois images simples et grandes sur lesquelles le cœur, une première fois, s’est ouvert.

I think that the reason such motivation strikes me so strongly is that it is right there, available for every last one of us, whenever we see the face of a child we love.