In Memory of Oliver Sacks: A Thinking Animal in a Beautiful World
“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
Neurologist and acclaimed author Oliver Sacks died this Sunday at the age of 82. He was truly a pioneer in his field, and his work and stories have left a lasting legacy in the worlds he touched. Sacks was known for using his patients’ disorders as the basis for beautiful and humbling meditations on the human condition and conscious thought. He spent decades studying the human brain and recording experiences that examined the mysteries of perception, memory, and consciousness, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Sacks announced earlier this year that a melanoma in his eye had spread to other organs and that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer. His eloquently written Op-Ed in the NY Times was filled with gratitude for a long life that allowed him to love, study, travel, learn, and “have an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.” His underlying belief was that who we are and who we become are the combinatorial products of the people and ideas we surround ourselves with — and the more different those people are from us the more expansive our minds are allowed to become.
As both doctor and writer, Dr. Sacks had the unique vantage point of weaving accounts of the brain’s strange pathways into digestible stories that would go on to become best sellers. He developed a love for pen and paper early in life and kept detailed journals starting from when he was fourteen, and he would wake frequently in the night to jot down his dreams and nighttime thoughts. “I rarely look at the journals I have kept,” he said. “The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.”
Dr. Sacks was so electrified by the work he began doing with patients at a migraine clinic in the 1960s that he felt compelled to compile his insights into a book. However, when he finished it and shared it with his boss at the clinic, the reception was less than cordial. In fact, his boss told him it was complete garbage and that Sacks would be fired immediately if he attempted to continue working on it or shared it with anyone else. Still, Sacks’ belief in his work was so strong that he took a leave of absence to work on the forbidden book and was fired a week later. He let go of the existing material and decided to write the book from scratch.
After completing the second draft in ten short days, he took it to Faber & Faber, his publishing house in London and walked over to the British Museum. He reflected that, “Looking at artifacts there — pottery, sculptures, tools and especially books and manuscripts which had long outlived their creators — I had the feeling that I, too, had produced something. Something modest, perhaps, but with a reality and existence of its own, something that might live on after I was gone.”
The book, Migraine, would become his first major work and was met with wholehearted critical acclaim. Dr. Sacks, bolstered by the confidence of its success, befriended other writers, such as the poet Thom Gunn, and began to think of himself as not just a scientist but also as a budding writer. One of the most important element of Sacks’ development as a writer was the undisturbed personal space he required for the “quickenings” of the creative process to unfold.
About this love for writing that he fused with his gift for science, he said: “I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self and autobiographical memory. The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other.”
This delight in writing and passionate curiosity is what we will remember about Dr. Sacks, and his particular brand of combinatorial creativity will continue to inspire writers to form deeper connections with other artists and stretch our understanding of the world around us.
Originally published at ozcontent.com on September 1, 2015.
