On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

sex is one of those areas—like religion and politics—where otherwise decent and rational people may have intense, irrational feelings.

unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life.

The point is not to stress contingency, but to identify it as a central theme for a genuine science based on the irreducibility of individuality, not as something standing against science but as an expectation of what we call natural law, and therefore as a primary datum of science itself.

C. S. Sherrington’s poetic evocation of the brain as “an enchanted loom,” where “millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.”

I did not seek American citizenship and was happy to have a green card, to be accounted a “resident alien.” This accorded with how I felt, at least for much of the time—a friendly, observant alien noting everything around me but without civic responsibilities such as voting or jury duty or need to affiliate myself with the country’s policies or politics.