I first read Oliver Sacks in 1986 when The Man who mistook his wife for a Hat was published by Picador. I was utterly absorbed by his stories of human beings compromised, often in extraordinary ways, by neurological problems, yet who managed to re-imagine themselves with resourcefulness and tenacity. The humanity and compassion of Oliver Sacks’ writing resonated deeply, as I had spent several weeks shortly before, in Walton Hospital’s neurology department, and ever since that experience, neurology has retained both an understandable fascination and fear.
Oliver Sacks writes with wit and compassionate curiosity. He is unafraid of revealing his own character in his writing. He is never cold and distant and his science is one of care and acceptance. His medicine is always person centered no matter how scientifically extraordinary his patients’ symptoms. Like Ray Bradbury and Toni Morrison I think he is one of the most visionary writers I have ever read.
He saw all right, but what did he see? I opened out a copy of theNational Geographic Magazine and asked him to describe some pictures in it.
His responses here were very curious. His eyes would dart from one thing to another, picking up tiny features, individual features, as they had done with my face. A striking brightness, a colour, a shape would arrest his attention and elicit comment—but in no case did he get the scene-as-a-whole. He failed to see the whole, seeing only details, which he spotted like blips on a radar screen. He never entered into relation with the picture as a whole—never faced, so to speak, its physiognomy. He had no sense whatever of a landscape or scene.
I showed him the cover, an unbroken expanse of Sahara dunes.
‘What do you see here?’ I asked.
‘I see a river,’ he said. ‘And a little guest-house with its terrace on the water. People are dining out on the terrace. I see coloured parasols here and there.’ He was looking, if it was ‘looking’, right off the cover into mid-air and confabulating nonexistent features, as if the absence of features in the actual picture had driven him to imagine the river and the terrace and the coloured parasols.
I must have looked aghast, but he seemed to think he had done rather well. There was a hint of a smile on his face. He also appeared to have decided that the examination was over and started to look around for his hat. He reached out his hand and took hold of his wife’s head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat! His wife looked as if she was used to such things. ( The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a hat, Oliver Sacks).
”To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.” ( Oliver Sacks)
”I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
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.” ( Oliver Sacks on his terminal illness)
