Gratitude, Oliver Sacks

May 24–25, 2019

Unlike the notes on the other OS Sacks books on this site, this was not — I don’t think! — read as part of the essays project with CT. Although I feel confident he has read it. I think that it was this book, my favorite of his works, that awakened my interest in him as an essayist, and let to the long detour that CT and I have taken through his ouvre.

What follows are my notes from circa 2019, in a less structured form than has been my later custom.

1. Mercury

He dreamed of Mercury, shimmering blobs rising and falling: Mercury, element 80, is a symbol of his age.
Other elements have taken their turn – Gold for 79 – signaling his lifelong interest in periodic table of the elements.
He writes of a near death experience at 41, accompanied by thoughts of gratitude, and giving and giving back.
… and of his pleasure in being alive, with positive and negative experiences…
… and of his regrets, and what it might mean to complete a life…
His hope for his end: to die in harness, as did Francis Crick.
His feeling of age not as a shrinking, but “an enlargement of mental life and perspective.”

Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks

March 2023

This is volume #25 in the Essays Project that CT and I are doing. It is the last volume of Sacks we have not yet read; we will also read Insomniac City by Bill Hayes, his partner in his final years, just for completeness. Then it is back to essays by other authors.

Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks

EP#24: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks, 2007

November 2025 – February 2026

This is the 24th entry in the Essays Project. We continue on our quest to read the complete Sacks oeuvre.

Afterwards: There were essays in this that I enjoyed, but overall the book seemed lacking to me. That’s especially true of the first half. I can’t really put my finger on what is missing, although perhaps it had to do with Sack often reporting on the what other neurologists had learned of other patients with cases similar to those of Sack’s patients…

Preface

It is a bit of a mystery why humans appreciate music. Darwin remarked on this in The Descent of Man, as have subsequent neurologists and psychologists such as Pinker. Pinker and others argue that our musical powers are a consequence of recruiting neurological systems developed for other purposes and that music has, in the words of William James, entered our mind by “the back stairs.“

Yet music is found in all cultures and, with a very few exceptions, all humans can perceive tones, timbre, pitch, intervals, melodies, harmony, and rhythm. Music, as well, seems to have a deep conection and resonance with emotions.

Our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music. How much this is due to the intrinsic characteristics of music itself-its complex sonic patterns woven in time, its logic, its momentum, its unbreakable sequences, its insistent rhythms and repetitions, the mysterious way in which it embodies emotion and “will”-and how much to special resonances, synchronizations, oscillations, mutual excitations, or feedbacks in the immensely complex, multilevel neural circuitry that underlies musical perception and replay, we do not yet know.

ibid. xii

To me, it seems evident that music is a means by which humans bond with one another, and strengthen connections within a community. I think back to Putnam’s observation that the best predictor of the economic success of towns in Italy was whether they had a chorale society, music being a way, as he saw it, to create social capital. It seems odd to me that Sacks (and others he cites) do not appear to pick up on this.

Island of the Colorblind, Oliver Sacks

October – November 2025

This is the 23rd entry in the Essays Project. We continue on our quest to read the complete Sacks oeuvre. Despite its title, this book is divided into two books: The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island.

Retrospective on the Book

This was not one of my favorite books, but it was not without interest. It gave interesting glimpses of life in the South Pacific, particularly the hints of how the US military dominates and suppresses freedom in this area of the world. Seems like a remnant of some of the worst of the colonial days. With respect to Sacks’ visits to various islands, the offer interesting accounts, though I have to say it seems to me that he learned little on his visits that he had not already learned from the informants who accompanied him or who he met there.

For me, the high point of the book was the last chapter about his visit to the island of Rota, a little-visited island near Guam. This visit, unlike the others, had no neurological goal: it was simply to see ferns, cycads and the other primitive plants that are dear to Sacks. I like this chapter because it provides some suggestive passages that offer insight on his love of ferns and the allies, which will come to the fore in his Oaxaca Journal. To wit:

The sense of deep time brings a deep peace with it, a detachment from the timescale, the urgencies, of daily life. Seeing these volcanic islands and coral atolls, and wandering, above all, through this cycad forest on Rota, has given me an intimate feeling of the antiquity of the earth, and the slow, continuous processes by which different forms of life evolve and come into being. Standing here in the jungle, I feel part of a larger, calmer identity; I feel a profound sense of being at home, a sort of companionship with the earth.

ibid., 198

Preface

Sacks wrote this book in one swoop, in July of 1995. Subsequently he added voluminous notes, which his editors paired back; this edition appears to have notes that the original one did not.

Sacks writes that his visits to the islands described herein were brief and unexpected, part of no agenda or research program. It does seem that he is pursuing his theme of how individuals (and, in this case, communities) adapt to rare neurological conditions: hereditary colorblindness in the first case, and a fatal neurodegenerative disorder in the second. It also sounds as if his other biological and botanical interests will play into the books.

EP#22: An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks

This book seems to focus on people with either acquired or inborn neurodivergences who have adapted to their situations and live, in a sense, in very different worlds from ours.

After reading: yes, this supposition is correct Most are leading successful, if different lives, except for ‘the last hippy’ of chapter 2.

EP#21: Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks

*Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, 1989.

August/September 2025

This is, I believe, volume 21 in the Essay’s Project; we are in the process of reading all of Oliver Sacks works. We’ve read much of his work in haphazard order, but after finishing his Letters, we decided to read those books we haven’t read in the order of publication. So far that has been Migraine, A Leg to Stand On, [skipping Awakenings which we’d already read], The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, and now Seeing Voices.

About the book, briefly

This describes Sacks jouney towards understanding Deafness, something he had been hitherto ignorant of. This book — really three separate essays — was written about three years into his inquiry, so, as Sacks notes, he is not writing from a position of expertise. Nevertheless, the book gives a very interesting history of how the Deaf were treated and how their circumstances evolved from being treated as mentally deficient people to non-disabled people who, though they could not hear, used Sign to express themselves, reason, and to develop a unique culture. There is also an account of ASL as a language, and its impact on cognition in those who learn it. It’s a good book, although I think there are probably now better books if what you are interested in is understanding how ASL works.

Preface

Sacks writes that he knew nothing of the Deaf before 1986. It appears that the particular incident that started him on his journey was a request to review the book When the Mind Hears, by Harlan Lane. The request, from Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books, was accompanied by a note: “You have never really thought about languge; this book will force you to.” Sacks writes (in the first section of the book) that he opened the book with “indifference which soon turned to incredulity.” Over time the review expanded to an essay (the first in this volume) when it appeared in the New York Review of Books in March of 1986. He writes that then Stan Horowitz of the University of California Press immediately responded to the essay and encourage him to turn it into a book. How things unfolded from there is not clear, though he visited Gallaudet later that year. It is clear that, over the three years he worked on the book, he was in dialog with leading researchers, including Ursula Bellugi, Bob Johnson of Gallaudet, and Jerome Brunner.

EP#20: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

* The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks. 1984

The 20th volume in the Essays Project (co-reading with CT) gets us back to essays. Here we are continuing our side quest to read all of OS’s work. This is Sack’s fourth book, and its excellence is consistent with my belief that Sack’s somehow found his muse — at least for writing for general audiences — while writing A Leg to Stand On, his previous book. Hat, so far, seems to be about various forms of agnosia — the loss of knowledge or awareness of things. So far this includes face and object recognition, awareness of limbs (or the entire body), and portions of the visual field. Looking ahead, I now see that only the first section is on “Losses,” so there will clearly be a much wider variety of ‘neurographies.’

The Book

Preface to the Original Edition (1985)

There is also a 2013 Preface, but I find little of note, though if you are reading the book it is worth a quick perusal.

Sacks begins the 1985 Preface by reflecting on his epigraphs, which has to do with his practicing medicine as a physician also involving getting a view of the larger context of his patients’ troubles — he sees himself as as much as naturalist as a physician. He also says, interestingly, that: “animals get diseases; only man falls radically into illness.” In my view, this reflects his view that some (all?, almost all?) diseases have an ontological component. I love the comment in one of his letters: “What is so instructive about disease, like disaster, is that it shakes the foundations of everything.” He also discusses the value of broad accounts, even stories, and laments the modern tendency to eliminate or minimize the subject of ‘case histories:’ “To restore the human subject at its center — the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject — we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale….” (p. xviii) He also brings in myths and fables with their hero’s and archetypes — “travelers to unimaginable lands, lands of which we should otherwise have no idea or conception.“

A Leg to Stand On, Oliver Sacks

June 2024

The 19th volume we’ve read in the increasingly poorly named Essay Project, this being (another) book that does not contain essays. But we’ve become fascinated by O.S. from reading his two autobiographies and the edited collection of his letters, and just can’t stop.

About the Book

This is the third book that Sacks published (1984), following Migraine and Awakenings. To me this is the book where he found his narrative voice, or at least the voice that has proved so engaging to non-medical readers. It is a breakthrough in his writing style. And it is a gripping narrative, with lucid and beautiful writing. Gone are the clinical passages and case histories that were interspersed throughout his first two books. It will be interesting to see if his subsequent ‘neurographies’ continue in this more narrative and engaging voice.

Migraine*, Oliver Sacks

*Migraine (Revised and expanded), Oliver Sacks, 1992

This is the 18th volume in the “Essays Project.” While the Essays Project has focused mainly on essays, we became intrigued with Oliver Sacks and are taking something of a detour to read his complete work, essays or not.

[[More to come…]]

Front Matter

There are prefaces to the original edition, and, to this, the 1992 edition. There is also a forward by William Gooddy, a migraine specialist whom Sacks praises in his prefaces. There is also a historical introduction, which summarizes over 2,000 years of medical writing on migraine; I will pass on summarizing this.

The following, from the ’92 Preface, is Sacks’ comment on the aims of the book; I think his thoughts on why humans may need to be ill, for a brief time, will be very interesting.

Migraine, of course, is not just a description, but a meditation on the nature of health and illness, and how, occasionally, human beings may need, for a brief time, to be ill; a meditation on the unity of mind and body, on migraine as an exemplar of our psychophysical transparency; and a meditation, finally, on migraine as a biological reaction, analogous to that which many animals show.

–Oliver Sacks, Migraine, xv

EP #16: Letters, Oliver Sacks

December 2024 – April 2025

This is book # 16 in the no-longer-very-aptly named Essays Project. Though perhaps, having detoured into the wilds of Shakespeare, a tour of the letters of Sacks, who is a formidable essayist, is steering us back towards the main track. Of course, letters are not essays, but their relative brevity and personal cast, as well as the wide-ranging nature of Sack’s epistles, give them a familial resemblance.

The book is edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks’ assistant and editor of several decades; she also contributes a brief preface which offers her perspective on Sacks’ compulsive writing process. Alas for her brevity; I believe she could offer a lot of insight on Sacks. But perhaps his letters will serve. Onward!

Preface and Editor’s Introduction

Sacks loved correspondence. He felt one ought to reply to letters, immediately if possible. He corresponded with, literally, thousands of people, from school children to Nobel laureates. Sacks took pains to preserve his letters with carbon sets, drafts, or later, photocopies, though by no means does all his correspondence survive. But that part which does runs to about 200,000 pages, or about 70 bankers’ boxes.

EP #`13: Awakenings, Oliver Sacks

January 2024

Entry 13 in the Essays Project with CT; this is the seventh book we’ve read by Oliver Sacks. This is the book that, with the help of a documentary and then movie, transformed him into something of a celebrity. It is an account of the experience of ‘awakening’ patients with Parkinson’s induced by Encephalitis Lethargia by administering L-Dopa, their experiences of returning to a sort of normal life, and then their declines due to the follow-on negative effects of L-Dopa.

EP#12: The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks

November-December 2023

Entry 12 in the Essays Project with CT; and this is the sixth book we’ve read by Oliver Sacks. Here we take up the neurological case account essays for which he is best known, after reading his two autobiographies, and other writings ranging from general essays to an account of his travels in Oaxaca. This book, published in 2010, explores cases in which people have lost visual abilities that we all take for granted – not so much blindness (although maybe there will be some essays on that), but rather the consequences of some of the many ways in which the complex and intertwined elements of the visual processing system may be disrupted.

EP #11: Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood*, Oliver Sacks, 2001

Entry 11 in the Essays Project with CT; the ‘summer of Sacks’ has turned into the fall of Sacks. It is interesting to be getting such a comprehensive view of a single person’s life and writing. Uncle Tungsten was apparently written in response to the spontaneous surfacing of childhood memories as Sacks approached his 60th year. We’ve read some other essays from that time, mostly from Everything in its Place (essays on South Kensington and Humphry Davies), and found those very good though we hope considerable new ground will be covered. [Later: New ground is being covered — there is not a lot of repetition…]

* Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks, 2001.

EP #10*: The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks

*The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ According to the introduction, this book was posthumously assembled at Sack’s direction a couple of weeks before his death. One of the catalysts was a televised panel with other notable scientists and scholars — Gould, Dyson, Dennet, etc. — that was later captured in a book called “A Glorious Accident.” This book contains a wide range of essays on scientific topics, with, I suspect, particular attention to history.

EP #9*: On the Move: A Life, Oliver Sacks

*On the Move, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

These are my notes on On the Move, Oliver Sacks autobiography (billed as volume 2, but the publisher, volume 1 being Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, written a couple of decades earlier). This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ These are not, of course, essays, but we have become interested in Sacks, and it is interesting to see the essays against a fuller narrative of his life.

EP #8*: Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks

Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

These are my notes on Oaxaca Journal, by Oliver Sacks, 2019. This is part 8 of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ Strictly speaking, these are not essays but rather chapters — or daily entries – from a journal he kept of a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with the American Fern Society.

Introduction

Sacks opens by writing of his love of the Natural History journals of the nineteenth century, and their blend of the personal and professional. He notes that most of the naturalists were essentially amateurs, self-taught, and feeling their way before or as biology and botany were crystalizing into sciences. He adds:

This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public. It was the sense of such an atmosphere that drew me to the American Fern Society in the first place, that incited me to go with them on their fern-tour to Oaxaca early in 2000.
Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal, p xiv

EP #7* – Everything in Its Place, Oliver Sacks

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