On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

“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’re 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.

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. I have never had such a strong feeling, a feeling of having made something real and of some value, as I did with that first book, which was written in the face of such threats from Friedman and, for that matter, from myself. Returning to New York, I felt a sense of joyousness and almost blessedness. I wanted to shout, “Hallelujah!” but I was too shy. Instead, I went to concerts every night—Mozart operas and Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert—feeling exuberant and alive.

“Common,” he said, “but never common. There is a genuine love in these casual encounters.” As the decorous stranger discreetly retired, I asked Wystan how he experienced the world, whether he thought of it as being a very small or very large place. “Neither,” he replied. “Neither large nor small. Cozy, cozy.” He added in an undertone, “Like home.”

I tried to engage them, whenever possible, in the morally neutral realm of play.

Then, taken aback by the intensity of his words and his expression, I said, “You care, you really care for me!” “Of course,” Eric said. “How could you doubt it?” But it was not easy to believe that anyone cared for me; I sometimes failed to realize, I think, how much my parents cared for me. It is only now, reading the letters they wrote to me when I came to America fifty years ago, that I see how deeply they did care. And perhaps how deeply many others have cared for me—was the imagined lack of caring by others a projection of something deficient or inhibited in myself? I once heard a radio program devoted to the memories and thoughts of those who, like me, had been evacuated during the Second World War, separated from their families during their earliest years. The interviewer commented on how well these people had adjusted to the painful, traumatic years of their childhood. “Yes,” said one man. “But I still have trouble with the three Bs: bonding, belonging, and believing.” I think this is also true, to some extent, for me.

There seem no limits to his curiosity and knowledge. He has one of the most spacious, thoughtful minds I have ever encountered, with a vast base of knowledge of every sort, but it is a base under continual questioning and scrutiny. (I have seen him suddenly stop in mid-sentence and say, “I no longer believe what I was about to say.”) At ninety-nine, his remarkable powers seem undiminished.

“My income,” Thom wrote, “averages about half that of a local bus-driver or street sweeper, but it is of my own choosing, since I prefer leisure to working at a full-time job.”

I found you so talented, but so deficient in one quality—just the most important quality—call it humanity, or sympathy, or something like that. And, frankly, I despaired of your ever becoming a good writer, because I didn’t see how one could be taught such a quality. . . . Your deficiency of sympathy made for a limitation of your observation. . . . What I didn’t know was that the growth of sympathies is something frequently delayed till one’s thirties. What was deficient in these writings is now the supreme organizer of Awakenings, and wonderfully so. It is literally the organizer of your style, too, and is what enables it to be so inclusive, so receptive, and so varied. . . . I wonder if you know what happened. Simply working with the patients over so long, or the opening-up helped by acid, or really falling in love with someone (as opposed to being infatuated). Or all three . . .

He wrote, “I am astonished to see that our Dutch series was so well received. I certainly enjoyed meeting you all immensely, but I doubt that I would have been inclined to spend hours before a TV set watching such a conversation among a group of folks usually characterized in these p.c. days as dead white European males.”