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