《The Last Interview》Oliver Sacks

ASHBROOK: I mean, you tell this wonderful story, I guess it all depends what frame of mind you bring to it, of Samuel Beckett in Paris with a friend of yours, and your friend saying to him, "Doesn't a day like this make you glad to be alive?" and Beckett answered...

SACKS: "I wouldn't go as far as that."

_

SACKS: I was just joining the faculty at Columbia, and I was having a sort of a... an interview. And at one point, the interviewer said to me, she said, "I have something rather private to ask you. Would you like Ms. Edgar, your assistant, to leave?" And I said, "No, she's privy to all my affairs." And I then said, thinking she was going to ask me about sex, I said, "I haven't had any sex for thirty-five years." I mean, in fact, she was going to ask me my social security number! And she burst into laughter, and she said, "Oh, you poor thing! We must do something about it."

Well, the truth is, Oliver didn't do anything about it because he didn't think he could. I mean, he had chosen Richard, lost Richard. Chosen Mel, lost Mel. What was the point, he was thinking. And then, finally, and who knows when or why these things happen to people, but a man came along who, for the first time, chose Oliver.

SACKS: I had met Billy as I meet a number of people, because I'd been sent a manuscript or a proof for a book. And, um, an intimacy grew between us. I don't think I quite realized how deep it was, but then there was a particular episode in Christmas of '09, when he came up. And in a sort of serious way he has, a serious, careful way, he said, "I have conceived a deep love for you."