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08/03/2016

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Why Oliver Sacks Always Goes Too Far


The neurologists new memoir, On the Move, is a celebration of the
fullness of human experiences.

Steve Jurvetson / Flickr

MICHAEL ROTH
MAY 16, 2015

HEALTH

TEXT SIZE

When the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks was a schoolboy,
a teacher noted on his report card: Sacks will go far, if he does not go too
far. It was a perceptive comment, for as it turned out, going too far was
something Sacks would do throughout his life. The child pushed the limits
of his chemistry set until the house filled with smoke, the young man filled
himself with drugs at first for pleasure and experimentationand then
because of addiction. Recreational swimming would last for several hours
in choppy waters, motorcycle rides would cross a continent, working out
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would result in his setting a California state record in weight lifting. In


the absence of internal controls, he tells us in his memoir, I have to have
external ones. As a gay man growing up in post-war England, sex was
dangerous, and so in this domain Sacks displayed prudence (except when
he didnt, as when visiting Amsterdam). But after a joyous 40th
birthday fling with a younger man, he has no sex for the next 35 years.
Even in renunciation, he went very far indeed.
And Sacks settled far from home. Having completed his studies in
medicine, he left his native England for North America. Both his parents
and two of his brothers were doctors, and he needed spaceplenty of
space. Perhaps more importantly, his brother Michael was schizophrenic,
and the suffering that filled the family home was more than Oliver could
bear. Oliver was the youngest Sacks, and he would make his career, and
his good name, in the United States.

Sacks developed a genius for paying attention to


people whose illness might have rendered them
invisible.
Going far career-wise was something Sacks fervently desired. Here I am,
look what I can do, is how he describes his feelings about his first
professional intervention into the American neurological community.
Sacks would develop a genius for recognition of another sort, for paying
attention to people whose illness might have rendered them invisible but
for his gift of seeing them as beings with histories, with contexts. This
genius he combined with his own craving for recognitionwriting as a
witness to the lives of others in such a way that he himself would be
acknowledged through the quality of his testimony.
Many people discovered Sacks through his book Awakenings (1973) and
the 1990 movie based upon it starring Robin Williams (as Sacks) and
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Robert DeNiro (as a patient). Sacks powerfully described his work with
hospitalized patients seemingly frozen in a decades-long Parkinsonian
sleep. For many years merely warehoused, they received from him the gift
of attention; and then he treated them with the experimental drug LDOPA, which seemed to bring them back to life. The physical awakenings
turned out to be short-lived, alas, but the book raised powerful questions
as to how we recognize and care for people living with, or rather alive
within, profound illness.
Although he has always taken voluminous notes on his patients and filled
hundreds of thousands of journal pages on myriad ideas that compelled
him, Sacks often suffered from writers block. He tells us of his struggle to
finish Awakenings, finally doing so as a tribute to his recently deceased
mother. Sacks tribute parallels Freuds writing of The Interpretation of
Dreams, which he had described as a reaction to the loss of his father. Both
men lost a parent when they were about 40Freud turning his attention to
his patients dreams, Sacks striving to help his patients awaken from their
slumbers.
Sacks sees himself in the tradition of Freud and of the Russian neurologist
A. R. Luria, medical men who took upon themselves the depiction of the
fullness of a patients life and not just the course of an illness. Their case
studies are powerful narratives, and Sacks, too, wanted his clinical
portraits to be recognized as literary achievements. When his friend, the
poet W.H. Auden, praised Awakenings as a masterpiece, Sacks tells us he
wept.

As a writer, he helps us to wonder at the human


ability to find a way to make sense of, even thrive in,
an altered world.
If Awakenings opened the door to literary acceptance and growing
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recognition, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) turned the
neurologist/author into a public figure. The case study for which the
collection is entitled is of a man with visual agnosia, the inability to
recognize objects, even people. Sacks helps us see the world from this
mans perspective, and from the points of view of those who cared about
him. Sacks has does the same for people with Tourretes, aphasia, amnesia,
autism. Hes written before about his own prosopagnosia, which hinders
his ability to recognize the faces of people he knowseven those he knows
well. As a writer, he shifts our gaze from the horror of deficits to the
wonder at the human ability to find a way to make sense of, even thrive in,
an altered world. He says of his subjects that [t]heir conditions were
fundamental to their lives and often a source of originality and creativity.
Sacks, often drawing on his own suffering, doesnt romanticize the horror
that many of his patients have faced over the years. He just recognizes that
there is no prescribed path of recovery; patients must create their own
solutions to the challenges they face. Sacks has deep affinities with those
poets and scientists who are at home with contingency, with the fact that
our complex brains, and our complex lives, can come together in ways that
we make meaningful through narrative reconstruction but that could
never has been predicted in advance. He relates, tellingly, his attraction to
Gerald Edelmans neural Darwinism, picturing the brain as an orchestra
without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music. And he
begins the book with an epigram from Kierkegaard: Life must be lived
forwards but can only be understood backwards.
Ive met Oliver Sacks only briefly, and he contributed an essay on Freuds
early neurological work to a volume I edited. Over the years, though, I had
the sense of getting to know him while reading his intensely engaging
accounts of people who take in the world or react to it so very differently
than most. Like many of his readers, some months ago I responded with a
sense of real personal sadness when reading Sacks New York Times op-ed
announcing his bad luck of now facing a terminal cancer. I felt as if a
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vital window on the world were being closed.


On the Move is a glorious memoir that throws open that window and
illuminates the world that we have seen through it. In this volume Sacks
opens himself to recognition, much as he has opened the lives of others to
being recognized in their fullness. In brief remarks on his almost 50 years
of psychoanalysis, Sacks tells the reader that his analyst, Leonard
Shengold, has taught me about paying attention, listening to what lies
beyond consciousness or words. This is what Sacks has taught so many
through his practice as a healer and through his work as a writer.
The authors father, a doctor who continued to see his patients into his
90s, was described by the Chief Rabbi of England as a tzaddik, a righteous
one. Oliver Sacks has taught us to try to apprehend the world righteously,
with generosity and with care. He, like his father, might be called a
tzaddik; but I suspect the son who would go far would be happy enough
just to be recognized as a mensch.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL ROTH is the president of Wesleyan University. His most recent books are Beyond
the University: Why Liberal Education Matters and Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on
Living With the Past.

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