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Oliver Sacks, Casting Light on theInterconnectedness of LifeBy MICHIKO KAKUTANI AUG. 30, 2015

It’s no coincidence that so many of the qualities that made Oliver Sackssuch a brilliant writer are the same qualities that made him an ideal doctor:keen powers of observation and a devotion to detail, deep reservoirs ofsympathy, and an intuitive understanding of the fathomless mysteries ofthe human brain and the intricate connections between the body and themind.

Dr. Sacks, who died on Sunday at 82, was a polymath and an ardenthumanist, and whether he was writing about his patients, or his love ofchemistry or the power of music, he leapfrogged among disciplines,shedding light on the strange and wonderful interconnectedness of life —the connections between science and art, physiology and psychology, thebeauty and economy of the natural world and the magic of the humanimagination.

In his writings, as he once said of his mentor, the great Sovietneuropsychologist and author A. R. Luria, “science became poetry.”

In books like “Awakenings,” “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for aHat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” Dr. Sacks — a longtime practicingdoctor and a professor of neurology at the New York University School ofMedicine — gave us case studies of patients whose stories were so odd, soanomalous, so resonant that they read like tales by Borges or Calvino. A

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man, with acute amnesia, who loses three decades of his life and liveswholly in the immediate present, unable to remember anything for morethan a minute or two. Idiot savant twins, who can’t deal with the mostmundane tasks of daily life but can perform astonishing numerical tricks,like memorizing 300-digit numbers or rattling off 20-digit primes. A blindpoet who suffers from — or is gifted with — extraordinarily complexhallucinations: a milkman in an azure cart with a golden horse; small flocksof birds wearing shoes that metamorphose into men and women inmedieval clothes.

Dr. Sacks depicted such people not as scientific curiosities but asindividuals who become as real to us as characters by Chekhov (anotherdoctor who wrote with uncommon empathy and insight). He was concernedwith the impact that his patients’ neurological disorders had on their day-to-day routines, their relationships and their inner lives. His case studiesbecame literary narratives as dramatic, richly detailed and compelling asthose by Freud and Luria — stories that underscored not the marginality ofhis patients’ experiences, but their part in the shared human endeavor andthe flux and contingencies of life.

Those case studies captured the emotional and metaphysical, as well asphysiological, dimensions of his patients’ conditions. While they trackedthe costs and isolation these individuals often endured, they alsoemphasized people’s resilience — their ability to adapt to their “deficits,”enabling them to hold onto a sense of identity and agency. Some even findthat their conditions spur them to startling creative achievement.

In fact, Dr. Sacks wrote in “An Anthropologist on Mars,” illnesses anddisorders “can play a paradoxical role in bringing out latent powers,developments, evolutions, forms of life that might never be seen or even beimaginable in their absence.” A young woman with a low I.Q. learns to singarias in more than 30 languages, and a Canadian physician with Tourette’ssyndrome learns to perform long, complicated surgical procedures withouta single tic or twitch. Some scholars believe, Dr. Sacks once wrote, thatDostoyevsky and van Gogh may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, that

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Bartok and Wittgenstein may have been autistic, and that Mozart andSamuel Johnson could have had Tourette’s syndrome.

In his later books, Dr. Sacks increasingly turned to chronicling his ownlife — from his deep love of chemistry as a boy in “Uncle Tungsten,” to hisexperiments with L.S.D. and amphetamines in “Hallucinations,” to hiscoming of age as a young man and as a doctor in “On the Move.” It was alife as eclectic and adventurous as his intellectual pursuits, taking him frommedical school in England to a stint as a forest firefighter in BritishColumbia to medical residencies and fellowship work in San Francisco andLos Angeles. He held a weight-lifting record in California, and onweekends, sometimes drove hundreds of miles on his motorcycle, fromCalifornia to Las Vegas or Death Valley or the Grand Canyon.

Animated by a self-deprecating sense of humor and set down in limber,pointillist prose, Dr. Sacks’s autobiographical accounts are as candid andsearching as his writings about his patients, and they suggest just howrooted his compassion and intuitive understanding — as a doctor and awriter — were in his youthful feelings of fear and dislocation. He tells usabout the lasting shock of being evacuated from London as a boy during thewar, and being beaten and bullied at boarding school. The rest of his life, hewrites, he would have trouble with the 3 B’s: “bonding, belonging, andbelieving.”

He also writes about the frightening psychotic episodes of hisschizophrenic brother, Michael, and his own feelings of shame for notspending more time with him — and his simultaneous need to get away.Science, with its promise of order and logic, provided a refuge for youngOliver from the chaos of his brother’s madness, and medicine promisedboth family continuity (his father was a general practitioner; his mother, asurgeon) and a way to study and try to understand brain disorders likeMichael’s.

Dr. Sacks once described himself as a man with an “extremeimmoderation in all my passions,” and his books pulsate with his “violent

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enthusiasms” and endless curiosity: his fascination with ferns,cephalopods, jellyfish, volcanoes, the periodic table — for all the marvels ofthe natural world; as well as his passion for swimming, chemistry,photography and perhaps most of all, writing. Known as Inky as a child, hebegan keeping journals at the age of 14. For the shy boy, writing was a wayto connect with the world, a way to order his thoughts; and he kept up thehabit throughout his life, amassing nearly a thousand journals, while usinghis books and essays to communicate to readers the romance of science andthe creative and creaturely blessings of being alive.

Inclined to living “at a certain distance from life,” Dr. Sacks writes thathe unexpectedly fell in love — “(for God’s sake!) I was in my 77th year” —with the writer Bill Hayes, which meant relinquishing “the habits of alifetime’s solitude,” like decades of meals that consisted mostly of cereal orsardines, eaten “out of the tin, standing up, in 30 seconds.”

In February, Dr. Sacks wrote in an Op-Ed essay in The New YorkTimes about learning that he had terminal cancer and had just months tolive. “I cannot pretend I am without fear,” he wrote. “But my predominantfeeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been givenmuch and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled andthought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the specialintercourse of writers and readers.

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on thisbeautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege andadventure.” His patients have lost an erudite and compassionate doctor.The world has lost a writer of immense talent and heart, a writer whohelped illuminate the wonders, losses and consolations of the humancondition.

Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

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