Swim to write

Swimming timelessly, without fear or fret, relaxed me and got my brain going. Thoughts and images, sometimes whole paragraphs, would start to swim through my mind, and I had to land every so often to pour them onto a yellow pad I kept on a picnic table by the side of the lake. I had such a sense of urgency sometimes that I did not have time to dry myself but rushed wet and dripping to the pad.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Individuality is wired in

Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of severa months discovers or selects his own motor solutions.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Sacks learns from patients

I find every patient I see, everywhere, vividly alive, interesting and rewarding; I have never seen a patient who didn't teach me something new, or stir in me new feelings and new trains of thought; and I think that those who are with me in these situations share in, and contribute to this sense of adventure. (I regard all neurology, everything, as a sort of adventure!)

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) (letter to a medical student who had asked to study with Sacks)

Sacks's lifetime of journals

I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and at last count had nearly a thousand. They come in all shapes and sizes, from little pocket ones which I carry around with me to enormous tomes. I always keep a notebook by my bedside, for dreams as well as nighttime thoughts, and I try to have one by the swimming pool or the lakeside or the seashore; swimming too is very productive of thoughts which I must write, especially if they present themselves, as they sometimes do, in the form of whole sentences or paragraphs.

. . . The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.

My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special indispensable form of talking to myself.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Teacher sizes up little Oliver Sacks

When I was twelve, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report, "Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far," and this was often the case.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life  (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Sacks ♥ quotations

I often transcribe quotations I like, writing or typing them on pieces of brightly colored paper and pinning them to a bulletin board. When I lived in City Island, my office was full of quotations, bound together with binder rings that I would hang to the curtain rods above my desk.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Oliver & Steve: intellectual brothers

[When a television] producer asked if I knew [Stephen Jay Gould], I had replied, "I've never met him, although we've corresponded. But nonetheless, I think of him as a brother."

Stever, for his part, had written to the producer, "I desperately want to meet Oliver Sacks. I see him as a brother, but we've never met."

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Sacks discovers thoughts by writing

It seems to me that I discover my thoughts through the act of writing, in the act of writing. Occasionally a piece comes out perfectly, but more often my writings need extensive pruning and editing, because I may express the same thought in many different ways. I can get waylaid by tangential thoughts and associations in mid-sentence, and this leads to parentheses, subordinate clauses, sentences of paragraphic length. I never use one adjective if six seem to me better . . . .  All this creates problems of organization. I get intoxicated, sometimes, by the rush of thoughts and am too impatient to put them in the rights order. But one needs a cool head, intervals of sobriety, as much as one needs that creature exuberance.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Awakenings, a page at at time

[B]ecause my impulse to cross out or fiddle with what I had just written was so great at this time, we agreed that I would slip each page under the door [of my editor] as it was written.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Sacks wasn't cut out for research

Perhaps I had never really expected to succeed in research. In a 1960 letter to my parents, wondering about doing research in physiology at UCLA, I wrote, "I am probably too temperamental, too indolent, too clumsy and even too dishonest to make a good research worker. The only things I really enjoy are talking . . . reading and writing."

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) (ellipsis in original)

Big book by forty

[My editor] suggested postponing publication [of Awakenings] so that sections could be prepublished in The Sunday Times, but I was strongly against this, because I wanted to see the book published on or before my birthday in July. I would be forty then, and I wanted to be able to say, "I may be forty, have lost my youth, but at least I have done something, I have written this book.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Sacks says to learn from older works, too

At UCLA, we residents had a weekly "Journal Club"; we would read the latest papers in neurology and discuss them. I sometimes annoyed the group, I think, by saying that we should also discuss the writings of our nineteenth-century forebears, relating what we were seeing in patients to their observations and thoughts. This was seen by the others as archaism; we were short of time, and we had better things to do than consider such "obsolete" matters. This attitude was reflected, implicitly, in many of the journal articles we read; they made little reference to anything more than five years old. It was as if neurology had no history.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Research interests make shy Sacks chatty

I am shy in ordinary social contexts: I am not able to "chat" with any ease; I have difficulty recognizing people . . .; I have little knowledge of and little interest in current affairs, whether political, social, or sexual. . . . Given all this, I tend to retreat into a corner . . . . But if I find someone, at a party or elsewhere, who shares some of my own (usually scientific) interests—volcanoes, jellyfish, gravitational waves, whatever—then I am immediately drawn into animated conversation (though I may still fail to recognize the person I am talking to a moment later).

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Oliver Sacks ♥ the OED

Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams prize [in anatomy, at Oxford]—£50! I had never had so much money at once. This time I went not to the White Horse but to Blackwell's bookshop (next door to the pub) and bought, for £44, the twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, for me the most coveted and desirable book in the world. I was to read the entire dictionary through when I went on to medical school, and I still like to take a volume off the shelf, now and then, for bedtime reading.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Character in sickness and health

I lied when I said, "It's not me, not the real me. It's the sickness that's speaking." For sickness has no voice, and it was me, a nasty me. How can I claim that my goodness, my lofty feelings, constitute the "real me," and that my rancor and malice are just "sickness" and not me?

We can readily see in others what we do not care, or dare, to see in ourselves. The patients I work with are chronically ill. They have, they know they have, little or no hope of recovery. Some of them show a transcendent humor and gallantry, an unspoilt love and affirmation of life. But others are bitter, virulent, envenomed—great haters, great spiters, murderous, demonic. It is not the sickness but the person that shows here, his collapse or corruption with the cruelties of life. If we have youth, beauty, blessed gifts, strength, if we find fame, fortune, favor, fulfillment, it is easy to be nice, to turn a warm heart to the world. But let us be disfavored, disfigured, incapicitated, injured; let us fall from health and strength, from fortune and favor; let us find ourselves ill, miserable and without clear hope of recovery—then our mettle, our moral character, will be tried to the limit. 

Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand on (1984 with 1993 afterward), p. 148 [Funny: the Kindle edition doesn't indicate the publisher.]