April – June, 2023
Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, Oliver Sacks, 2019.
Favorites
Waterbabies, 1997
Remembering South Kensington, 1993
Travels with Lowell, 1988
The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, 2009
Botanists on Park, 2009
Orangutan
These are my notes on Everything in Its Place, by Oliver Sacks, 2019. This is the last book of Sacks’ essays, except for, I believe, Gratitude, and contains essays collected from across his life, but including his final reflections on life. This is part 7 of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT.
Favorites are *’d.
Part 1: First Loves
* Waterbabies
The New Yorker, 1997
On his love of swimming. The essay begins with his learning to swim, starting out at a few months, and over time learning by watching his father.
But I could see how my old man, huge and cumbersome on land, became transformed – graceful, like a porpoise – in the water; and I, self-conscious, nervous, and also rather clumsy, found the same delicious transformation in myself, found a new mode of being, in the water.
Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: Waterbabies, p 4
He notes this is similar to the way the children in Micronesia learn to swim (a visit which appears to have provoked this essay) by just messing about in the water, without any formal instruction. (He also notes, in passing, that Europeans learned the Crawl from Micronesians, and that before this transpired, the awkward breast stroke was the dominant style of swimming.)
He talks about his experiences swimming as he came of age, and after, and beautifully sketches the joy he gets from it:
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.
Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: Waterbabies, p 6
I like the idea that swimming can transform one’s experience of oneself, and, by extrapolation, the way that other ‘immersive activities’ can induce similar transformations. For me, it is hiking, particularly uphill, when my steps, breaths and heart fall into rhythms, none quite the same, but all in response to the same activity. This can also happen for me with running, and also with snorkeling and body surfing. …It is interesting that it is only snorkeling and bodysurfing, and not swimming, that does this for me. I’ve always felt like my body was a bit too dense and that I could never achieve effortless flotation under my own power; it is only with the slight buoyancy added by the mask and fins and snorkel, or that lift provided by the breaking waves, that I can attain the sort of free-floating buoyant euphoria that Sacks gets from swimming.
These reflections also make me ponder their opposite case: activities that transform our experience in a negative way. An injury to muscles or nerves is the obvious case, transmuting ordinary taken-for-granted movements into painful ones, and rendering effortful what was formerly effortless. I wonder if this is an intimation of illness and aging, where activities of daily life become challenging. I wonder how, if this is the case, one might come to accept these changes without falling into the opposite of the euphoria which Sacks depicts here.
* Remembering South Kensington
Discover, 1991
On his love of museums, and particularly their role early in his life.
They have played a central role in my life in stimulating the imagination and showing me the order of the world in vivid, concrete form, but in a tidy form, in miniature.
—Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: South Kensington, p 7
I don’t respond to museums in this way, but I like the tension — at least it seems like a tension to me – between expanding one’s view of the order in the world, but doing so in a way that is tidy and easy to grasp. He talks about going to the museums of South Kensington constantly, and of even figuring out a way to hide so that he was able to spend the night in the museum, where he prowled among the exhibits, experiencing them differently as they loomed out of the darkness into .the periphery of his flashlight’s glow. The more modern mode of security with motion sensors and such has no doubt put an end to such hijinks. A pity.
He writes of exhibits that particular struck him, such as minerals:
I loved the sense here of a nonliving world – the beauty of crystals, the sense that they were built of identical atomic lattices, perfect. But if they were perfect, mathematics incarnate, they also stirred me with their sensuous beauty.
ibid., p 10
And he also writes of the periodic table:
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.
ibid., p 12
The periodic table seems a particularly apt metaphor for his love of museums, capturing, as it does, the order of the universe in a small and tidy format. It is also interesting that, as he discusses in one of his last essays, that he has the custom of linking his age to the element with the same atomic number, thus connecting himself to the eternal (cf. Mercury (#80), in his final book, Gratitude).
First Love
The New York Review of Books, 2001
Sacks discusses his first permanent friendships, formed in his boyhood and adolescence, with other boys who shared his interest in science. Two themes emerge, foreshadowed in earlier essays: seeking a personal connection with science (e.g, adopting particular zoological groups, in his case, cephalopods), and various acts of science-inspired mischief.
Jonathan and Eric did not really share my love of chemistry though a year or two earlier they had joined me in a flamboyant chemical experiment: throwing a large lump of metallic sodium into the Highgate Ponds on Hampstead Heath and watching excitedly as it took fire and sped round and round on the surface like a demented meteor, with a huge sheet of yellow flame beneath it…
—Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves, p 13-14
Humphrey Davey: Poet of Chemistry
The New York Review of Books, 1993
This essay is somewhere between a review of David Knight’s 1992 biography of Humphrey Davey, and an appreciation of the man himself; it also, refracted as it is through Sacks perspective, further paints the picture of a boy enchanted with chemistry. It also nicely emphasizes the connection between the scientific and the literary (so evident in Sacks own writing) by discussing the friendship between Davey and Coleridge.
At this time there still existed a union of literary and scientific cultures: there was not the dissociation of sensibilities that was so soon to come.
—Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: Humphrey Davey: Poet of Chemistry, p 13-14
After retracing Davy’s scientific achievements, as well has his frustrations, Sacks reflects on the role of history and having one’s personal ‘heroes.’ To me, this is the key contribution of the essay, so I will quote at length:
I HAVE SAID THAT Humphry Davy was a boyhood hero to virtually everyone interested in chemistry or science in my generation. We all knew and repeated his famous experiments, imagining ourselves in his place.
[…]
Now I find to my dismay that when I speak to my younger scientific friends, none of them has heard of Davy, and some of them are puzzled when I tell them of my interest. It is difficult for them to imagine what relevance such “old” science can have.
[…]But this is not what I have found in reality: when I came to write my first book, Migraine, in 1967, I was stimulated by the nature of the malady and by encounters with my patients, but equally, and crucially, by an “old” book on the subject, Edward Living’s Megrim, written in the 1870s. I took this book out of the rarely entered historical section of the medical school library and read it, cover to cover, in a sort of rapture. I reread it many times for six months, and I got to know Living extremely well. His presence and his way of thinking were continually with me. My prolonged encounter with Living was crucial for the generation of my own thoughts and book.
[…]I do not think my experience is unique. Many scientists, no less than poets or artists, have a living relation to the past, not just an abstract sense of history and tradition but a feeling of companions and predecessors, ancestors with whom they enjoy a sort of implicit dialogue. Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought,” independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. 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, anymore than we outgrow our childhoods.
ibid., p 38-39
I resonate with the idea of writing as a conversation, even if it be a rather one-sided one. Certainly those writers in the past cannot reply; nor, in most cases, can members of one’s imagined audience do so. It is only – and this is no doubt an essential aspect of what makes scholarship work – within the context of an academic field where papers respond and evoke responses, that something approaching true conversation can be achieved, and even there – even when accelerated by the digital technology that enables rapid publication and dissemination – the conversation is a slow one.
Libraries
The Threepenny Review, `2014
A love letter to libraries, and the imagined community of those within the library, and to physical books. The essay deplores the shift to digital materials, even as the South Kensington essay deplored the move from 19th century glass-and-mahogany cased exhibits, and the shift from the classic rectangular periodic table to “one of your nasty, natty little spirals” (an innovation which, apparently, lacked staying power as I am only familiar with the table form of the periodic table). I am neutral on most of these shifts, but agree that is much is lost, and little – except easy accessibility and search ability – is gained in the case of physical books.
… reading break …
A Journey Inside the Brain
The New York Review of Books, 2009
This is Sacks’ account of one of the first autobiographical ‘medical essays,’ A Journey Round my Skull, by Frigyes Karinthy. The book-length essay gives an account of his experience of having a brain tumor, from its first symptoms through the surgery which successfully removed it. Sacks reports reading the book as a teenager, suggests that it influenced his own medical writing. and for this essay revisited it several decades later. The bulk of the essay walks through the book, describing Karinthy’s first intimations of the tumor (auditory hallucinations of an invisible train which curiously often occurred at 7:00pm) , his visits to specialists and his worsening symptoms, and finally the surgery — performed while he was conscious — that removed the tumor.
The essay is mildly interesting, but it suffers from being a second-hand account, and Sacks provides little detail on how reading the book influenced him.
Clinical Tales
Cold Storage [Hypothyrodism/hibernation]
Granta, `1987
A clinical account of ‘Uncle Toby,’ a man who had gradually slowed (and cooled) down until he was essentially immobile. His family had accommodated to this gradual shift, but while they cared for him they didn’t summon a physician. After seven years Sacks’s supervisor (this was while Sacks what a medical student), discovered Uncle Toby on a housecall to deal with another matter. He brought Toby into the hospital, where it was quickly confirmed that he had almost no thyroid function, and they started giving him medication to start his thyroid function. He gradually warmed up, and regained awareness and mobility, and had no sense that seven years had passed. Unfortunately, his return to full functionality was accompanied by a fast-growing tumor which killed him within weeks of his ‘awakening.’
A curious account. It’s fascinating to learn that someone’s bodily functions can almost stop and their temperature decrease by thirty degrees, and that they can then come out of it. I wonder if this is how ‘medical comas’ are induced.* And I wonder if this could be used a sort of suspended animation for space travelers, as the essay at least implies that aside from some muscle wasting he was in good shape. Beyond this, there is not much to the essay.
* As it turns out, medical comas are induced by continuously administering sedatives. The purpose is generally to reduce brain function to minimize trauma due to swelling, or to avoid seizures.
Neurological Dreams
MD, 1991
Sacks’ thesis is that dreams may reveal information useful to physicians. He gives a wide-ranging accounts of dreams — and particularly changes in the nature of dreams — that may have light to shed on medical conditions. Among the more interesting:
- The first symptoms of a disease — particulary neurological or sensory symptoms — may occur in a dream. Intimations of the onset of Parkinsons, for example
- Likewise, the first indications of remission or recovery may occur in dreams. In both these cases, the suggestion is that the brain is detecting otherwise not-yet-noticable changes that are being projected into dreams.
- Symptoms of diseases — for example the visual effects that accompany the onset of migraines — may manifest themselves in dreams, either as anomalous intrusions, or blended into the dream itself (e.g., migraine phosphenes being transformed into fireworks in a dream).
Mildly interesting. I note that Sacks does not give any accounts of cases in which dreams were specifically useful to him in diagnosing a condition. This is yet another ‘isn’t that interesting’ sort of essays.
Nothingness [Anesthesia and numbness]
The Oxford Companion to the Mind, 1987
A discussion of the phenomena of losing the sensory awareness of a limb or other part of the body, as occurs, for example, in spinal anesthesia. The essay claims that in spinal anesthesia, it is not just that feeling is lost, but that one feels that the lower half of the body is “wholly, impossibly, non-existent, that one has been cut in half and that the lower half is absolutely missing.” I am not sure about this. Sacks goes on to talk of more common examples, where a limb has gone to sleep, and although it is indeed an uncomfortable experience, I don’t think I have the experience he is laying out. The limb is numb, I can’t move it, but it does not seem to me to be absolutely gone.
The essay is a little disappointing in that it doesn’t go into this phenomenon very deeply. For example, it seems to me that one could distinguish between instances when one gets no sensation from a body part but is nevertheless aware of it and that it lacks sensation, and between instances like blind spots and other lacunae in the visual field in which one is not aware that anything is missing and instead experiences reality as one did before, excepting the blind spot that one does not notice.
Seeing God in the Third Millenium [Hallucinations]
www.theatlantic.com, 1997
This discusses cases of ecstatic seizures that are associated with temporal lobe epilepsy; ecstatic seizures are relatively rare, occuring in only 1 to 2 percent of cases of TLE. These seizures seem to induce a sense of bliss and feelings of the numinous, but can also induce long-term changes in beliefs.
From this he exapnds to a discussion of other states of consciousness like out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) and near death experiences (NDEs). OBEs and NDEs feature hallucinations so vivid and compelling that some insist on their reality; furthermore, they often have similarities across people that are taken by some to indicate their objective reality.
Hallucinations seem real because they employ the same mechanisms that underlie veridical perception. Hallucinations of voice are accompanied by activity in the auditory pathways, and so on for other senses, mutatis mutandis. In fact, OBE’s and similar experiences can be induced in controlled conditions by manipulating cues so as to confuse the visual and kinesthetic perceptual systems, creating an uncanny sense of embodiment. Likewise NDEs feature a customary sequence of stages: moving a long a black tunnel towards a light; a vision of friends and family waiting; and a rapid replay of life memories, all accompanied by a feeling of well-being.
Two cases are discussed: A recap of Dr. Circoria discussed in Musicophilia, who along with his near death experience became obsessed with listening to and playing classical music; and Dr. Alexander, who after a near death experience became a believer in heaven, and became a bit of an evangelist. In the latter case, Sacks critiques Alexander’s dismissal of neurological reasons for his experience.
Sacks also points to researchers who argue that the features of NDEs — specifically the black tunnel and bright light — can be tied to neurological states: constriction of visual fields due to reduced blood pressure in the eyes, and the flow of visual excitation from the brainstem to the visual cortext. His argument is that “hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not supernatural,” but rather testify only to brain’s power to create experiences and narratives.
Hiccups and other Curious Behaviors
Previously unpublished.
Sacks begins with an account of curing a long –six day — episode of hiccups with hypnosis. (Hiccups appear to represent a vestigial form of behavior, perhaps tied to gill movements of our Devonian ancestors. Hiccups are know to occur in human fetuses as early as six weeks.)
Next he moves to the surviors of the 1917-27 encephalitis epidemic, of whom many developed postenchephalitis which resulted in many of them falling into a lethargic stupor. In 1969 Sacks administered L-Dopa to some of these patients, resulting in them awakening, but exhibiting a vast range of involuntary behavioral tics, sometimes including hiccups; interestingly, other patients would sometimes seem to be entrained by others’ behavior and begin imitating them in a kind of behavior contagion.
In this, and following essays, he discusses a wide range of simple, automatic, usually-motor-based behaviors — hiccups, laughing, winking, coughing, sneezing, gestures, vocalizations — that seem to normally be inhbited by the frontal cortex, but that can, under various circumstances, be ‘released,’ so that the occur spontaneously and can only be repressed with constant effort.
… reading break …
* Travels with Lowell [Tourette’s]
Life, 1988
This focuses on Tourette’s syndrom, and is the most interesting case in this batch. In the mid 1980’s Sacks meet a young photojournalist named Leon Handler who had Tourette;’s, and made friends with him and ended up traveling to a number of places with him, where he met other people with Tourette’s. It’s a fascinating story — both for the vagaries of traveling with someone who Tourette’s, and for its account of the variety of ways in which Tourette’s manifests itself. Three things stood out:
Social Transgressiveness. One has to do with the way that Tourette’s is connected with social transgressiveness. I was aware Tourette’s suffer’s involuntarily utter obscene words, but was surprised to learn that — as in the case of a Vietnamese man who swore only in Vietnamese — the compulsion went away when he was in American in the absence of speakers of Vietnamese. Similarly, Lowell of the essay title has a compulsion to touch people, but if he were out in the desert among cactus’es the compulsion would cease because ‘what would be the point?’ Tourette’s is much more about social interaction and presence than I had thought. Very interesting.
Yet, it should be noted that not all Tourette’s involves socially transgressive behavior, and that even in La Crete — the remote Canadian town where having Tourette’s is a normal thing — that Tourette’s behavior still occurs.
Can be voluntarily suppressed, but requires continuous effort. The other interesting point was that the Tourette’s tics can be controlled by their subject, to a point, and that people get real pleasure from ‘releasing’ the tic.
“‘There is something primal in Tourette’s – whatever I perceive or think or feel is instantly transformed into movements and sounds.’ She enjoyed this rushing stream; she felt it was ‘like life itself.’
Oliver Sacks, Everything in its Place, p 97
Attraction to roughness and asymmetry.
SOMETIMES TOURETTERS ARE attracted by sudden bits of tactility or visual appearance — crumpledness, skewedness, odd asymmetries or shapes. (One Touretter, a wood-carver, likes to introduce sudden, convulsive asymmetries in his work– to make a chair “shaped like a tic or shriek.” ) Lowell often indulges in a compulsive repetition and permutation of odd words and sounds, whose very oddness provokes and gratifies the ear. At breakfast one morning, he got excited by the oatmeal, which he called
Oliver Sacks, Everything in its Place, p 99
“oakmeal,» and kept repeating, “Oakmeal, oakmeal…”
“I take great pleasure in repeating words over and over again,” he said. “It’s the same feeling of satisfaction as I have with my compulsive touching- like having to touch the glass on your watch, feeling the click of my nail on the glass, reveling with different senses.”
Urge [Compulsive behavior in the wake of temporal lobe surgery]
The New York Review of Books, 2015
Account of a man who — in the wake of surgery to control temporal lobe epilepsy – experienced a variety of compulsions, most notable eating and sex. He was also highly distractable, but at the same time could get ‘stuck’ in various activities like playing the piano for 8 or 9 hours at a time. His sexual compulsions led him to online pronography, and thence into child pornography, and thence into legal difficulties. Put on drugs that eliminated his sexual drive, he reverted to normal.
The Catastrophe
The New Yorker, 2015
About Spaulding Gray, the accident that derailed his career, and the ultimately fruitless efforts to address his neurological problems.
Dangerously Well
Adapted from an article published in Neurology, 2004
About a man who, put on steroids for polymyalgia rheumetodia, developed “steroid psychosis” (after having increased his dosage fivefold). Reducing his steroid use to its previous level did little to help, and he was gradually tapered off the drug. During this period he grew worse, and his doctors assumed he had a neurodegenertive disease such as Alzheimers. Yet, when he went entirely off the drug, his dementia ceased, and his cognitive functions returned to normal.
This is interesting because while it is often believed that neurogenerative diseases are irreversible, there are cases, such as this, where that does not hold true.
… reading break …
Tea and Toast
Previously unpublished
An inadequate diet by an elderly woman leads to dementia due to a B12 deficiency; in this case it is reversed by the administration of B12 shots, though it is not always reversible.
Telling
Previously unpublished
What, when, how, and sometimes whether, to deliver bad news to patients. This is particularly an issue in cases of dementia, and in particular with the question of whether to ‘go along’ with patients’ delusions. Two cases, one of a medical director, and another of a janitor, are described. In the former the director was sometimes permitted to believe he was still acting as a doctor; this sometimes provided comfort, sometimes not. In the latter, allowing the patient to believe and act as though he was still a custodian seemed to give him persistent purpose and meaning that lasted til the end of his life.
The Aging Brain
Adapted from Neurology, 1997
An account of Alzheimers, and the many forms it takes. One point of interest is that (some) neurologists see its progression as not just producing behavioral or cognitive deficits, but also as eliminating regulatory mechanisms which may release ‘more primitive’ neural behaviors, and throughout all this re-organizing its functions to maintain, as best it can, its level of functioning.
The article notes that many people also maintain healthy neurological functioning, and even the move into new forms of knowledge and experience, what we often term wisdom.
Kuru
The New Yorker, 1997
A discussion of various forms of TSEs — Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies — and the mechanism — prions — that produce them. It appears that prions are deviant, pleated forms of neural proteins which can act as “pattern setting nucliants” and lead to the spreading recrystallization of neural proteins. These proteins are highly resistant to heat and other things that typically destroy living organisms, and thus can be transmitted by consumption or other forms of contact. They have an extremely long incubation period, though it is not clear to me why that would be.
A Summer of Madness
The New York Review of Books, 2008
About the onset, progression and management of bipolar disease, mostly discussed with reference to the case of Sally Greenberg, as documented by her father in the book Hurry Down Sunshine. The book is notable for providing a perspective on what it feels like to be bipolar. To other books that take similar approaches, Touched with Fire…, by Kay Redfield Jamison and Wisdom, Madness and Folly, by John Cuschack, are mentioned.
One point I found interesting was that — as Sally was beginning to work with a psychiatrist — she was urged to see her bipolar disease as distinct from her identity.
… reading break …
* The Lost Virtues of the the Asylum
The New York Review of Books, 2009
Though we tend to think of asylums as horrid places, it is useful to remember that they began as charitable endeavors with noble goals, and for a time, at least, were not dysfunctional and provided a refuge and ‘safe place to be mad’ for many. As one inmate wrote in the late 19th century, ‘Before I had been an inmate of the asymlum for a week, I felt a greater degree of contentment than I had felt for a year.”
Anna also spoke (as Lucy King recounts in her book From Under the Cloud at Seven Steeples) of how crucial it was, for the disordered and disturbed, to have the order and predictability of the asylum:
“This place reminds me of a great clock, so perfectly regular and smooth are its workings. The system is perfect, our bill of fare is excellent, and varied, as in any well-regulated family. … We retire at the ringing of the telephone at eight o’clock, and an hour later, there’s darkness and silence..’
all over this vast building.
Oliver Sacks, The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, 2009
Sacks discusses other virtues of the asylum, including the opportunity for work in kitchens, gardens, etc., leisure activities like art and music and reading, and large well appointed rooms. They were places where one could be both made and safe, and have the possibility of support and even meaningful work.
His account makes it sound like a combination of factors lead them into decline. One was the intersection of overcrowding and underfunding; another was the arrive of anti-psychotic medications which, while they were often seen as promising cures, often alleviated only the ‘positive symptoms’ (mania, hallucinations, etc.) without addressing the negative symptoms (depression, fatigue, anomia, etc); and yet another was the move towards deinstitutionalization and community-based care, which really resulted in many patients being on the streets.
The article discusses the Flemish town of Geel, which for 700 years has had a custom of adopting mentally ill people into families, to the extent that it is seen as a normal part of life. Sacks describes this, and also discusses ways in which the Geel approach has been modified to take advantage of advances in the understanding and treatment of mental illness without destroying what is good about its long-time approach.
Part III: Life Continues
Anybody Out There? [Astrobiology]
Natural History, 2002
To me this essay seemed disorganized and lacking a point. I’m a bit surprised it would be published.
It is sort of, I suppose, a mediation on the origin of life, on our planet and elswhere. It begins with a description of H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon, and its assumption that Oxygen is a marker of a life-friendly planet. [I note, in passing, that according to Sack’s precis of the book, two men in space suits somehow managed to light a piece of paper on fire to make this inference — how they managed this trick, and why they were even prepared to, is an interesting question.] Sacks does note that early life existed quite well without oxygen, obtaining energy by converting Nitrogen to Ammonia, or Sulfur to Hydrogen Sulfide and so on.
Sacks notes that it is not clear if life has to become more ‘advanced’ as it evolves, but that at the least there is a tendency for it to become more highly organized and efficient. Prokaryotes evolved into Eukaryotes, and possibly prokayotes were preceded by progenotes, capable of metabolizing, growing and dividing, but lacking a mechanism for precise replication. Certainly there are microfossils in some of the oldest rocks we know of — 3.5 Ga — indicating that life evolved with a few hundred million years of it cooling enough to permit the formation of liquid water and organic compounds.Sacks reviews various theories of the origin of life, including panspermia and the origin of life in undersea volcanic vents.
Clupeophilia
The New Yorker, 2007
Describes a gathering to celebrate the annual spring festival of Clupeus, the god of herring. He says a bit about the types and preparations of Herring, and describes the festival in more detail. He calls it one of the great democratizing experiences — along with baseball, music, and bird-watching — that bring very different sorts of people together. A bit more description of what is on offer, and then the festival goers depart, trickling into the streets… Of mild interest; I can see that it’s slice-of-a-small-niche-of-esoteric-life-in-NYC aspect would suit it to the New Yorker.
Colorado Springs Revisited
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, 2010
Sacks is visiting the very luxurious Broadmore resort in Colorado Springs, and describes being provided with far more service than he cares for. This serves as a foil for his last visit to Colorado Springs. It was his introduction to America at 27, after growing up in England. He was touring the country on his motorcycle with a backpack, waiting for his green card to be granted. He recounts his first impressions of the USA in the 60’s – it’s moral openness, it’s classlessness (at least among the fraternity of cyclists) – and he alludes but does not discuss how his initial enthusiam was tempered over time. A nice if not enthralling essay.
* Botanists on Park
The New Yorker, 2009
Describes a gathering of the American FernSociety in mid-town New York, and a tour they took through the city. Recounts a bit of the natural history of ferns and the ferns sited during their walk. Another nice if not enthralling essay; the details on fems are nice. And, as before, it seems well-suited to the New Yorker.
Death is not built into these plants, as it is for us more specialized life-forms, with the ticking clocks of our telomeres, out liability to mutations, our running-down metabolisms. But youth is apparent, even in ferns. The young Woodsia are charming: a bright spring green; tiny, like babies; toes; and very soft and vulnerable.
Oliver Sacks, Botanists on Park (Everything in its Place, p 221-222), 2004,
Greetings from the Island of Stability
The New York Times, 2004
Not among his best essays; I’m a little surprised the NYT would publish it, but it does speak as more about science as an enterprise than synthetic elements. It led me to look up the current state of the art, and I report on the below.
About the recent creation of new elements — 113 and 115 — not found in nature, and the speculation that there will be an island of stability at around 115. He discusses the origin of the idea of elements, their discovery, including the last of the naturally-existing elements, and then the enterprise to create new heavier elements by Glen Seaborg and his colleagues. The new elements were increasingly unstable, and they thought, several times, that they had created the final element that would be stable even for an infinitesimal amount of time.
Then, in the late 1960’s, a radical new theory of the atomic nucleus was developed, that posited it had structures, that protrons and neutrons were arranged in shells, and that their stability depended on whether the shells were ‘filled,’ by analogy to electron shells. According to this theory, the ideal number of protons was 114 and the ideal number of neutrons would be 184, and an element with these double ‘magic numbers’ would be far more stable than others.
No one knows for sure where this island lies, or even if it exists at all. Theory suggests that the next magic numbers beyond those known are around 108, 110 or 114 protons, and 184 neutrons. These configurations, according to calculations, could lead to special properties that allow atoms to survive much longer than similar species. “All existing data for elements 116, 117 and 118 do confirm that lifetimes increase as one goes closer to the neutron number 184, says theorist Witold Nazarewicz of Oak Ridge, who was not involved in the study. “This is encouraging.”
—Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American, 2014
Superheavy magic nuclei may turn out to have interesting shapes that confer stability, such as a so-called bubble configuration with a hole in the middle. “These have never been discovered yet, but the region that is being explored now is really on the edge of bubble territory,” Nazarewicz says.
If an island of stability does exist, there is no limit to how long its nuclei may last. They could turn out to be stable enough to be found in nature, albeit in such small quantities that we have not seen them yet. Numerous searches are on for evidence of these superheavy species already in existence, perhaps having formed through powerful cosmic events such as the merging of two neutron stars.
What is exciting about this, beyond the scientific challenge, is that new synthetic elements — if they were super stable — could open the possibility for materials with novel properties, though such super-stable elements seem to be squarely in the territory of science fiction.
The state of the art, circa 2021, as reported by ChatGPT 4.0 (so its claims should be double-checked):
Elements such as flerovium (114) and oganesson (118) are of particular interest when considering the island of stability. Certain isotopes of these elements are theorized to have relatively long half-lives due to these stabilizing effects, but as of my knowledge cutoff in 2021, experimental confirmation of these stable superheavy isotopes is still a topic of ongoing research.
–ChatGPT 4.0, on 26 May 2023
… reading break …
Reading the Fine Print
The New York Times Book Review, 2012
A short essay on reading, and the pleasures of tangible books, that also touches on the issues that his declining eyesight raise. Nothing remarkable, but essays like this often strike a chord with those who love reading, and this sounds a soft one.
The Elephant’s Gait
Omnivore, 2003
A short essay on the early scientific studies of gait by pioneers like Muybridge and Marty, spurred on by Leland Stanford who was interested in horses. A nice little bit of history, but nothing special as an essay.
* Orangutan
Previously unpublished.
A one page essay describing a moment of mutual recognition with an orangutan, both of them pressing their faces against the separating glass, and both superimposing their hands, so similar in structure. Quite beautiful.
Why we Need Gardens
Previously unpublished.
Describes his life long love of gardens, and his practice of visiting botanical gardens wherever he travels. Also touches on their medical uses: “In forty years of practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmeceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.” He goes on to point out that even patients whose dementia that is so severe that they have forgotten how to tie their shoes, they still know what to when provided with a seedling and a flower bed: “I have never seen such a patient plant something upside down.“
Night of the Ginkgo
The New Yorker, 2014
A brief essay describing how ginkgos drop their leaves (“tough, heavy Mesozoic leaves such as the dinosaurs ate”) all at once.
Filter Fish
The New Yorker, 2015
An essay on Gefilte fish, and how his mother used to make it, and how later, after his mother’s death, a housekeeper, Helen Jones, learned how to make it for him. And how, although she has died, now, in his final weeks, it is the only thing he can eat, and deliveries arrive daily from neighborhood delis. “Gefilte fish will usher me out of this life, as it ushered me into it, eighty-two years ago.“
Life Continues
Previously unpublished.
A lament about how ‘modern’ life, with its digital turn, has lost many of the things he values. This essay has a bit of a petulant tone, unusual for Sacks, and I’m sorry the editors decided to end this book with this piece.