Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

by Oliver Sacks

“her normally warm chestnut eyes are shell-like and dark, as if they’ve been brushed over with lacquer.”

Each time, however, her otherness is reaffirmed. It is as if the real Sally has been kidnapped, and here in her place is a demon, like Solomon’s, who has appropriated her body. The ancient superstition of possession! How else to come to grips with this grotesque transformation?…In the most profound sense Sally and I are strangers: we have no common language.

the mind falls in love with psychosis.

Freud spoke of all psychoses as narcissistic disorders: one becomes the most important person in the world, chosen for a unique role, whether it is to be a messiah, a redeemer of souls, or (as happens in depressive or paranoid psychoses) to be the focus of universal persecution and accusation or derision and degradation.

The miracle of normalcy,

progenotes

bombinating

caught between the poles of inevitability and uniqueness.

There are certain passions—one wants to call them innocent, ingenuous passions—that are great democratizers. Baseball, music, and bird-watching come immediately to mind.

Airmen, to my mind, were the motorbikers of the air, with goggles and leather helmets and thick leather flying jackets, enjoying ecstasies, facing dangers, like Saint-Exupéry (and perhaps fated, like him, to die young).

Victorian times, an age of amateurs and naturalists.

There is something about such announcements that raises the spirits, thrills one, evokes thoughts of new lands being sighted, of new areas of nature revealed.

We search for the island of stability because, like Mount Everest, it is there. But, as with Everest, there is profound emotion, too, infusing the scientific search to test a hypothesis.

What we now call the visual word form area is part of a cortical region near the back of the left side of the brain that evolved to recognize basic shapes in nature but can be redeployed for the recognition of letters or words. This elementary shape or letter recognition is only the first step.

George Bernard Shaw called books the memory of the race.

In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

coeval

“What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said?…I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into his phone for half his waking life.”

Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases.

There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to nonstop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand.

Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplati...

“I want to see you not through the Machine. I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

reduced from human beings to Humean ones.

What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.

Though I revere good writing and art and music, it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.

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