by Oliver Sacks
Muybridge went back to the technique he had developed on Stanford’s farm, using a battery of twenty-four cameras. Marey, however, using his slot-shuttered “photographic gun,” and marking his elephants with pieces of paper on their joints, was able to get all the stages of the elephant’s movement on a single plate, in a series of overlapping, ghostly images, which showed the vertical movement of the shoulder and hip joints. Such composites give one an extraordinary sense of movement, of an elephant’s actual motion and the intricate mechanics involved, which Muybridge’s rather static images do not begin to convey. It was Marey’s 1887 chronophotograph that rushed into my mind when I read the 2003 Nature article on whether elephants run.
The 2003 analysis makes use of sophisticated timers, digitization, and computer analysis—refinements not available in 1887—and with these, it can be shown that elephants in a hurry do, in fact, run and walk simultaneously. That is, the vertical movement of the shoulders indicates a walking motion, while the vertical movement of the hips indicates a running one. It has to be, one guesses, relatively fast walking and relatively slow running; otherwise the hindquarters would collide with the front end. Marey and Muybridge, one feels, would be pleased by this.
Orangutan
Some years ago while visiting the Toronto Zoo, I visited an orangutan. She was nursing a baby—but when I pressed my bearded face against the window of her large, grassy enclosure, she put her infant down gently, came over to the window, and pressed her face, her nose, opposite mine, on the other side of the glass. I suspect my eyes were darting about as I gazed at her face, but I was much more conscious of her eyes. Her bright little eyes—were they orange too?—flicked about, observing my nose, my chin, all the human but also apish features of my face, identifying me (I could not help feeling) as one of her own kind, or at least closely akin. Then she stared into my eyes, and I into hers, like lovers gazing into each other’s eyes, with just the pane of glass between us.
I put my left hand against the window, and she immediately put her right hand over mine. Their affinity was obvious—we could both see how similar they were. I found this astounding, wonderful; it gave me an intense feeling of kinship and closeness as I had never had before with any animal. “See,” her action said, “my hand, too, is just like yours.” But it was also a greeting, like shaking hands or matching palms in a high five.
Then we pulled our faces away from the glass, and she went back to her baby.
I have had and loved dogs and other animals, but I have never known such an instant, mutual recognition and sense of kinship as I had with this fellow primate.
Why We Need Gardens
As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
The wonder of gardens was introduced to me very early, before the war, when my mother or Auntie Len would take me to the great botanical garden at Kew. We had common ferns in our garden, but not the gold and silver ferns, the water ferns, the filmy ferns, the tree ferns I first saw at Kew. It was at Kew that I saw the gigantic leaf of the great Amazon water lily, Victoria regia, and like many children of my era, I was sat upon one of these giant lily pads as a baby.
As a student at Oxford, I discovered with delight a very different garden—the Oxford Botanic Garden, one of the first walled gardens established in Europe. It pleased me to think that Boyle, Hooke, Willis, and other Oxford figures might have walked and meditated there in the seventeenth century.
I try to visit botanical gardens wherever I travel, seeing them as reflections of their times and cultures, no less than living museums or libraries of plants. I felt this strongly in the beautiful seventeenth-century Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, coeval with its neighbor, the great Portuguese Synagogue, and liked to imagine how Spinoza might have enjoyed the former after he had been excommunicated by the latter—was his vision of “Deus sive Natura” in part inspired by the Hortus?
The botanical garden in Padua is even older, going right back to the 1540s, and medieval in its design. Here Europeans got their first look at plants from the Americas and the Orient, plant forms stranger than anything they had ever seen or dreamed of. It was here, too, that Goethe, looking at a palm, conceived his theory of the metamorphoses of plants.
When I travel with fellow swimmers and divers to the Cayman Islands, to Curaçao, to Cuba, wherever—I seek out botanical gardens, counterpoints to the exquisite underwater gardens I see when I snorkel or scuba above them.
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I HAVE LIVED in New York City for fifty years, and living here is sometimes made bearable for me only by its gardens. This has been true for my patients, too. When I worked at Beth Abraham, a hospital just across the road from the New York Botanical Garden, I found that there was nothing long-shut-in patients loved more than a visit to the garden—they spoke of the hospital and the garden as two different worlds.
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.
My friend Lowell has moderately severe Tourette’s syndrome: in his usual busy, city environment, he has hundreds of tics and verbal ejaculations each day—grunting, jumping, touching things compulsively. I was therefore amazed one day when we were hiking in a desert to realize that his tics had completely disappeared. The remoteness and uncrowdedness of the scene, combined with some ineffable calming effect of nature, served to defuse his ticcing, to “normalize” his neurological state, at least for a time.
An elderly lady with Parkinson’s disease, whom I met in Guam, often found herself frozen, unable to initiate movement—a common problem for those with parkinsonism. But once we led her out into the garden, where plants and a rock garden provided a varied landscape, she was galvanized by this, and could rapidly, unaided, climb up the rocks and down again.
I have a number of patients with very advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, who may have very little sense of orientation to their surroundings. They have forgotten, or cannot access, how to tie their shoes or handle cooking implements. But put them in front of a flower bed with some seedlings, and they will know exactly what to do—I have never seen such a patient plant something upside down.
My patients often live in nursing homes or chronic-care institutions, so the physical environment of these settings is crucial in promoting their well-being. Some of these institutions have actively used the design and management of their open spaces to promote better health for their patients. For example, Beth Abraham hospital, in the Bronx, is where I saw the severely parkinsonian postencephalitic patients I wrote about in Awakenings. In the 1960s, it was a pavilion surrounded by large gardens. As it expanded to a five-hundred-bed institution, it swallowed most of the gardens, but it did retain a central patio full of potted plants that remains very crucial for the patients. There are also raised beds so that blind patients can touch and smell and wheelchair patients can have direct contact with the plants.
I work also with the Little Sisters of the Poor, who have nursing homes around the world. They are a Catholic order, originally founded in Brittany in the late 1830s, that spread to America in the 1860s. At that time, it was common for an institution such as a nursing home or a state hospital to
have a large farm garden and often a dairy as well. Alas, this is a tradition that has mostly vanished, but the Little Sisters are trying to reintroduce it today. One of their New York City residences is situated in a leafy suburb in Queens, with plenty of walkways and benches. Some of the residents can walk by themselves, some need a stick, some need a walker, and some have to be wheeled—but nearly all of them, when it becomes warm enough, want to be outside in the garden and the fresh air.
Clearly, nature calls to something very deep in us. Biophilia, the love of nature and living things, is an essential part of the human condition. Hortophilia, the desire to interact with, manage, and tend nature, is also deeply instilled in us. The role that nature plays in health and healing becomes even more critical for people working long days in windowless offices, for those living in city neighborhoods without access to green spaces, for children in city schools, or for those in institutional settings such as nursing homes. The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.
Night of the Ginkgo
Today in New York—November 13th—leaves are falling, drifting, skittering everywhere. But there is one striking exception: the fan-shaped leaves of the ginkgo are still firmly attached to their branches, even though many of them have turned a luminous gold. One sees why this beautiful tree has been revered since ancient times. Carefully preserved for millennia in the temple gardens of China, ginkgoes are almost extinct in the wild, but they have an extraordinary ability to survive the heat, the snows, the hurricanes, the diesel fumes, and the other charms of New York City, and there are thousands of them here, mature ones bearing a hundred thousand leaves or more—tough, heavy Mesozoic leaves such as the dinosaurs ate. The ginkgo family has been around since before the dinosaurs, and its only remaining member, Ginkgo biloba, is a living fossil, basically unchanged in two hundred million years.
While the leaves of the more modern angiosperms—maples, oaks, beeches, what have you—are shed over a period of weeks after turning dry and brown, the ginkgo, a gymnosperm, drops its leaves all at once. The botanist Peter Crane, in his book Ginkgo, writes about a very large ginkgo in Michigan, “for many years there was a competition to guess the date on which the leaves would fall.” In general, Crane says, it happens with “eerie synchronicity,” and he quotes the poet Howard Nemerov:
Late in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.
Are the ginkgoes responding to some external signal, such as the change of temperature or light? Or to some internal, genetically programmed signal? No one knows what lies behind this synchronicity, but it is surely related to the antiquity of the ginkgo, which has evolved along a very different path from that of more modern trees.
Will it be November 20th, 25th, 30th? Whenever it is, each tree will have its own Night of the Ginkgo. Few people will see this—most of us will be asleep—but in the morning the ground beneath the ginkgo will be carpeted with thousands of heavy, golden, fan-shaped leaves.
Filter Fish
Gefilte fish is not an everyday dish; it is to be eaten mainly on the Jewish Sabbath in Orthodox households, when cooking is not allowed. When I was growing up, my mother would take off from her surgical duties early on Friday afternoon and devote her time, before the coming of Shabbat, to preparing gefilte fish and other Sabbath dishes.
Our gefilte fish was basically carp, to which pike, whitefish, and sometimes perch or mullet would be added. (The fishmonger delivered the fish alive, swimming in a pail of water.) The fish had to be skinned, boned, and fed into a grinder; we had a massive metal grinder attached to the kitchen table, and my mother would sometimes let me turn the handle. She would then mix the ground fish with raw eggs, matzo meal, and pepper and sugar. (Litvak gefilte fish, I was told, used more pepper, which is how she made it—my father was a Litvak, born in Lithuania.)
My mother would fashion the mixture into balls about two inches in diameter—two to three pounds of fish would allow a dozen or more substantial fish balls—and then poach these gently with a few slices of carrot. As the gefilte fish cooled, a jelly of an extraordinarily delicate sort coalesced, and, as a child, I had a passion for the fish balls and their rich jelly, along with the obligatory khreyn (Yiddish for horseradish).
I thought I would never taste anything like my mother’s gefilte fish again, but in my forties I found a housekeeper, Helen Jones, with a veritable genius for cooking. Helen improvised everything, nothing was by the book, and, learning my tastes, she decided to try her hand at gefilte fish.
When she arrived each Thursday morning, we would set out for the Bronx to do some shopping together, our first stop being a fish shop on Lydig Avenue run by two Sicilian brothers who were as like as twins. Though the fishmongers were happy to give us carp, whitefish, and pike, I had no idea how Helen, African-American, a good, churchgoing Christian, would manage with making such a Jewish delicacy. But her powers of improvisation were formidable, and she made magnificent gefilte fish (she called it “filter fish”), which, I had to acknowledge, was as good as my mother’s. Helen refined her filter fish each time she made it, and my friends and neighbors got a taste for it, too. So did Helen’s church friends; I loved to think of her fellow Baptists gorging on gefilte fish at their church socials.
For my fiftieth birthday, in 1983, she made a gigantic bowl of it—enough for the fifty birthday guests. Among them was Bob Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, who was so enamored of Helen’s gefilte fish that he wondered if she could make it for his entire staff.
When Helen died, after seventeen years of working for me, I mourned her deeply—and I lost my taste for gefilte fish. Commercially made, bottled gefilte fish, sold in supermarkets, I found detestable compared to Helen’s ambrosia.
But now, in what are (barring a miracle) my last weeks of life—so queasy that I am averse to almost every food and have difficulty swallowing anything except liquids or jellylike solids—I have rediscovered the joys of gefilte fish. I cannot eat more than two or three ounces at a time, but an aliquot of gefilte fish every waking hour nourishes me with much-needed protein. (Gefilte-fish jelly, like calf’s-foot jelly, was always valued as an invalid’s food.)
Deliveries now arrive daily from one shop or another: Murray’s on Broadway, Russ & Daughters, Sable’s, Zabar’s, Barney Greengrass, the Second Avenue Deli—they all make their own gefilte fish, and I like it all (though none compares to my mother’s or Helen’s).
While I have conscious memories of gefilte fish from about the age of four, I suspect that I acquired my taste for it even earlier, for, with its abundant, nutritious jelly, it was often given to infants in Orthodox households as they moved from baby foods to solid food. Gefilte fish will usher me out of this life, as it ushered me into it, eighty-two years ago.
Life Continues
My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastics, and so on—but she could not accustom herself to the disappearance of the old. “Where have all the horses gone?” she would sometimes say. Born in 1892, she had grown up in a London full of carriages and horses.
I have similar feelings myself. A few years ago, I was walking with my niece Liz down Mill Lane, a road near the house in London where I grew up. I stopped at a railway bridge where I had loved leaning over the railings as a child. I watched various electric and diesel trains go by, a
nd after a few minutes Liz, growing impatient, asked, “What are you waiting for?” I said that I was waiting for a steam train. Liz looked at me as if I were crazy.
“Uncle Oliver,” she said. “There haven’t been steam trains for more than forty years.”
I have not adjusted as well as my aunt to some aspects of the new—perhaps because the rate of social change associated with technological advances has been so rapid and profound. I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.
In his 2007 novel Exit Ghost, Philip Roth speaks of how radically changed New York City appears to a reclusive writer who has been away from it for a decade. He is forced to overhear cell-phone conversations all around him, and he wonders, “What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said?…I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into his phone for half his waking life.”
