《On the Move》Oliver Sacks

My Mother, a surgeon and anatomist, while accepting that I was too clumsy to follow in her footsteps as a surgeon, expected me at least to excel in anatomy at Oxford.  We dissected bodies and attended lectures and, a couple of years later, had to sit for a final anatomy exam.  When the results were posted, I saw that I was ranked one from bottom in the class.  I dreaded my mother's reaction and decided that, in the circumstances, a few drinks were called for.  I made my way to a favorite pub, the White Horse in Broad Street, where I drank four or five pints of hard cider - stronger than most beer and cheaper too.

Rolling out of the While Horse, liquored up, I was seized by a mad and impudent idea.  I would try to compensate for my abysmal performance in the anatomy finals by having a go at a very prestigious university price - the Theodore Williams Scholarship in Human Anatomy.  The exam had already started, but I lurched in, drunkenly bold, sat down at a vacant desk, and looked at the exam paper.

There were seven questions to be answered; I pounced on one ("Does structural differentiation imply functional differentiation?") and wrote nonstop for two hours on the subject, bringing in whatever zoological and botanical knowledge I could muster to flesh out the discussion.  Then I left, an hour before the exam ended, ignoring the other six questions.

The results were in The Times that weekend; I, Oliver Wolf Sacks, had won the prize.  Everyone was dumbfounded.

-

"Travel now by all means - if you have the time.  But travel the right way, the way I travel.  I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place.  I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space.  Take the prairies, for example; you are wasting your time visiting these unless you know the saga of the homesteaders, the influence of law and religion at different times, the economic problems, the difficulties of communication, and the effects of successive mineral finds."

-

Those early morning rides were about feeling intensely alive, feeling the air on one's face, the wind on one's body, in a way only given to motorcycle riders.  Those morning have an almost intolerable sweetness in memory, and nostalgic images of them are instantly provoked by the smell of eucalyptus.

-

Sunday Migrant

Another patient at the headache clinic was a young mathematician who also had Sunday migraines.  He would start to get nervous and irritable on Wednesday, and this would become worse by Thursday; by Friday, he could not work.  On Saturday he felt tormented, and on Sunday he would have a terrible migraine.  But then, towards the afternoon, the migraine would melt away.  Sometimes as a migraine disappears, the person may break out in a gentle sweat or pass pints of pale urine; it is almost as if there is a catharsis at both physiological and emotional levels.  As the migraine and the tension drained out of this man, he would feel himself refreshed and renewed, calm and creative, and on Sunday evening, Monday and Tuesday he did highly original work in mathematics.  Then he would start getting irritable again.

When I gave this man medication and cured him of his migraines, I also cured him of his mathematics, disrupting this strange weekly cycle of illness and misery followed by a transcendent sort of health and creativity.

-

A large group of people have same disease, colour blind, sleeping syndrome.

-

Early in the summer of 1994, I was adopted by a stray cat.  I got back from the city one evening, and there she was, sitting sedately on my porch.  I went into the house and brought out a saucer of milk; she lapped thirstily.  Then she looked at me, a look that said, "Thanks, buddy, but I'm hungry, too."

... it was only when I had settled myself on the sofa by the window that the cat, lying parallel to me, now started to eat her supper as I ate mine.  So we ate together, in synchrony.  I found this ritual, which was to be repeated every evening, remarkable.  I think we both had a feeling of companionship - which one might expect with a dog but rarely with cat.  The cat liked to be with me; she would even, after a few days, walk down to the beach with me and sit next to me on a bench there.

-

However much the actors immerse themselves, identify, they are merely playing the part of a patient; Lillian has to be one for the rest of her life.  They can slip out of their roles, she cannot.  How does she feel about this? (How do I feel about Robin playing me? A temporary role for him, but lifelong for me.)

As Bob is wheeled i and takes up the frozen, dystonic posture of Leonard L., Lillian T., herself frozen, cocks and alert and critical eye.  How does Bob, acting frozen, feel about Lillian, scarcely a yard away, actually so?  And how does she, actually so, feel about him,, acting so?  She has just given me a wink, and a barely perceptible thumbs-up sign, meaning, "He's okay-he's got it! He really knows what it's like."

-

There were families he had treated for several generations, and he sometimes startled a young patient by saying, "Your great-grandfather had a very similar problem in 1919."  He knew the human, the inward side of his patients no less than their bodies and felt he could not treat one without the other.  (Indeed, it was often remarked that he knew the insides of his patients' refrigerators as well as the insides of their bodies.)

-

Mind map.  When brain damage can forget the link between things but the memory might still be there.  They might not answer the question but will make accurate answer when guess. (where was the president killed)

-

I had read proofs of Billy's book The Anatomist and admired it.  I wrote to him and suggested that we might meet if he found himself on the East Coast (which he did, on a visit to New York in September of 2008). I liked his thinking, which was both serious and playful, his sensitivity to the feelings of others, and his combination of forthrightness and delicacy.  It was a new experience for me to lie quietly in someone's arms and talk, or listen to music, or be silent, together.  We learned to cook and eat proper meals together; I had more or less lived on cereal up to this point, or sardines, which I would eat out of the tin, standing up, in thirty seconds.  We started to go out together - sometimes to concerts (which I favored), sometimes to art galleries (which he favored), and often to the New York Botanical Garden, which I had traipsed around, alone, for more than forty years.  And we started to travel together: to my city, London, where I introduced him to friends and family; to his city, San Francisco, where he has many friends; and to Iceland, for which we both have a passion.

We often swim together, at home or aboard.  We sometimes read our works in progress to each other, but mostly, like any other couple, we talk about what we are reading, we watch old movies on television, we watch the sunset together or share sandwich for lunch.  We have a tranquil, many-dimensional sharing of lives - a great an unexpected gift in my old age, after a lifetime of keeping at a distance.