Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

by Oliver Sacks

When I came to New York, in the mid-1960s, I started to swim at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, and would sometimes make the circuit of City Island—a swim that took me several hours. This, indeed, is how I found the house I lived in for twenty years: I had stopped about halfway around to look at a charming gazebo by the water’s edge, got out and strolled up the street, saw a little red house for sale, was shown round it (still dripping) by the puzzled owners, walked along to the real estate agent and convinced her of my interest (she was not used to customers in swim trunks), reentered the water on the other side of the island, and swam back to Orchard Beach, having acquired a house in midswim.

There is a total engagement in the act of swimming, in each stroke, and at the same time the mind can float free, become spellbound, in a state like a trance. I have never known anything so powerfully, so healthily euphoriant—and I am addicted to it, fretful when I cannot swim.

And then there is the wonder of buoyancy, of being suspended in this thick, transparent medium that supports and embraces us.

One can move in water, play with it, in a way that has no analogue in the air. One can explore its dynamics, its flow, this way and that; one can move one’s hands like propellers or direct them like little rudders; one can become a little hydroplane or submarine, investigating the physics of flow with one’s own body.

I hope I can follow him, and swim till I die.

Books are not real in this sense; they are only words. Museums provide arrangements of the real, exemplars of nature.

I could be a vicarious naturalist, an imaginary traveler with a ticket to the whole world, without leaving South Kensington.

the green monochrome,

of the Jurassic.

dinosaur-like machines

I had an overwhelming sense of Truth and Beauty when I saw the periodic table, a sense that this was not a mere human construct, arbitrary, but an actual vision of the eternal cosmic order, and that any future discoveries and advances, whatever they might add, would only reinforce, reaffirm, the truth of its order.

“I consider it fortunate that I was left much to myself as a child, and put upon no particular plan of study,”

simple, pure, undecomposable bodies made up of “corpuscles” of a particular kind.

Boyle's definition of elements in The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

the main business of chemistry as analysis

breaking down complex substances into their constituent elements and seeing h...

Coleridge the chemist of language, Davy the poet of chemistry.

There is not necessarily any contradiction between a mystical or transcendent philosophy and a rigorously empirical mode of experiment and observation; they can go together, as they certainly did with Newton.

Science, it is often said, is impersonal, consists of “information” and “concepts”; these advance by a process of revision and replacement in which old information and old concepts become obsolete. In this view, the science of the past is irrelevant to the present, of interest only to the historian or psychologist.

But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.

I learned to read early, at three or four, and books, and our library, are among my first memories.

it was there I received my real education.

On the whole, I disliked school, sitting in class, receiving instruction; information seemed to go in one ear and out the other. I could not be passive—I had to be active, learn for myself, learn what I wanted, and in the way that suited me best.

I was not a good pupil, but I was a ...

At the library I felt free—free to look at the thousands, tens of thousands, of books; free to roam and to enjoy the special atmosphere and the quiet companionship of other readers, all, like myself, on quests of their own.

there is something irreplaceable about a physical book: its look, its smell, its heft.

Olivecrona, here, seems almost like Virgil, guiding his poet-patient through the circles and landscapes of his brain.

Nature abhors a vacuum—and so do we.

Wittgenstein grounds “certainty” in the certainty of the body: “If you can say, here is one hand, we’ll grant you all the rest.”

All of these are experiences of nothingness (or, more precisely, privations of the experience of somethingness).

it was both affecting and absurd, reminding me of the excitement of two dogs meeting.

There is, among Orthodox Jews, a blessing to be said on witnessing the strange: one blesses God for the diversity of his creation, and one gives thanks for the wonder of the strange.

(almost as radium had been extracted from pitchblende).

Sándor Ferenczi, the great psychoanalyst, started developing some very unusual ideas in the early 1930s—that analysts, for example, should lie down on the analytic couch beside their patients. These ideas, albeit a little heretical, were at first seen as expressions of his remarkable originality of mind, but as they grew wilder it became evident that Ferenczi had an organic psychosis, which turned out to be associated with pernicious anemia.

the insignia of his office, his official identity.

strategies (albeit unconscious and almost automatic) by which the brain-damaged organism sought to survive, although perhaps in a more rigid and impoverished way.

“The physician,”

“is concerned, unlike the naturalist, with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances.”

The brain/mind, in contrast, is anything but automatic, for it is always seeking, at every level from the perceptual to the philosophical, to categorize and recategorize the world, to comprehend and give meaning to its own experience.

it must adventure and advance throughout life.

If the brain is to stay healthy, it must remain active, wondering, playing, exploring, and experimenting right to the end.

“We cannot be taught wisdom,” as Proust remarks, “we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.”

In the nineteenth century,

a powerful mind could still take all of nature for its subject,

In our own time,

even the largest minds must narrow their gaze,

If we are lucky enough to reach a healthy old age, this sense of wonder can keep us passionate and productive to the end of our lives.

At that time, neurology was still largely descriptive, almost ornithological, and CJD was seen as a rara avis, along with Hallervorden-Spatz disease, Unverricht-Lundborg syndrome, and other such exotic, eponymous rarities.

It was only in 1968 that CJD was shown to be a transmissible disease.

no source of food can be considered safe from infection by prionlike agents.

“dangerously well”