by Oliver Sacks
But the response which affected me most, for it contrasted what I had become with what I had been when I first met Thom, was contained in a letter he wrote to me after I sent him Awakenings in 1973. He wrote,
Awakenings is, anyway, extraordinary. I remember when, some time in the late Sixties, you described the kind of book you wanted to write, simultaneously a good scientific book and worth reading as a well-written book, and you have certainly done it here…. I have also been thinking of the Great Diary you used to show me. I found you so talented, but so deficient in one quality—just the most important quality—call it humanity, or sympathy, or something like that. And, frankly, I despaired of your ever becoming a good writer, because I didn’t see how one could be taught such a quality…. Your deficiency of sympathy made for a limitation of your observation…. What I didn’t know was that the growth of sympathies is something frequently delayed till one’s thirties. What was deficient in these writings is now the supreme organizer of Awakenings, and wonderfully so. It is literally the organizer of your style, too, and is what enables it to be so inclusive, so receptive, and so varied…. I wonder if you know what happened. Simply working with the patients over so long, or the opening-up helped by acid, or really falling in love with someone (as opposed to being infatuated). Or all three…
I was thrilled by this letter, a bit obsessed, too. I did not know how to answer Thom’s question. I had fallen in love—and out of love—and, in a sense, was in love with my patients (the sort of love, or sympathy, which makes one clear-eyed). I did not think that acid, of which I had had a fair sampling, had played a real part in opening me up, though I knew that it had been crucial for Thom.3 (I was intrigued, though, to see that the L-dopa I gave to the postencephalitic patients sometimes produced effects similar to what I myself had experienced on LSD and other drugs.) On the other hand, I felt that psychoanalysis had played a crucial role in allowing me to develop (I had been in intensive analysis since 1966).
When Thom spoke of the growth of sympathy in one’s thirties, I could not help wondering whether he was also thinking of himself, in particular of the change in himself and his poetry which one sees in My Sad Captains (he was thirty-two when this was published), about which he later wrote, “The collection is divided into two parts. The first is the culmination of my old style—metrical and rational, but maybe starting to get a little more humane. The second half consists of taking up that human impulse…in a new form [which] almost necessarily invited new subject matter.”
I was twenty-five when I first read The Sense of Movement, and what appealed to me then, along with the beauty of image and the perfection of form, was the almost Nietzschean emphasis on will. By the time I came to write Awakenings, in my late thirties, I had changed profoundly, and Thom had too. It was now his new poems, with their huge range of subject matter and sensibility, which appealed to me more, and we were both happy to leave the Nietzschean stuff behind. By the 1980s, as we both moved into our fifties, Thom’s poetry, while never losing its formal perfection, grew freer and more tender. The loss of friends, surely, played a part here; when Thom sent me “Lament,” I thought it the most powerful, the most poignant, poem he had ever written.
I loved the sense of history, of predecessors, in many of Thom’s poems. Sometimes this was explicit, as in his “Poem After Chaucer” (which he sent me as a New Year’s card in 1971); more often it was implicit. It made me feel at times that Thom was a Chaucer, a Donne, a Lord Herbert, who now found himself in the America, the San Francisco, of the late twentieth century. This sense of ancestors, of predecessors, was an essential part of his work, and he often alluded to, or borrowed from, other poets and other sources. There was no tiresome insistence on “originality,” and yet, of course, everything he used was transmuted in the process. Thom later reflected on this in an autobiographical essay:
I must count my writing as an essential part of the way in which I deal with life. I am however a rather derivative poet. I learn what I can from whom I can. I borrow heavily from my reading, because I take my reading seriously. It is part of my total experience and I base most of my poetry on my experience. I do not apologize for being derivative…. It has not been of primary interest to develop a unique poetic personality, and I rejoice in Eliot’s lovely remark that art is the escape from personality.
There is a danger, when old friends meet, that they will talk mostly of the past. Thom and I had both grown up in northwest London, been evacuated in the Second World War, played on Hampstead Heath, drunk in Jack Straw’s Castle; we were both products of our families, schools, times, and cultures. This formed a certain bond between us and allowed an occasional sharing of recollections. But much more important was the fact that we had both been drawn to a new land, to the California of the 1960s, disenthralled from the past. We had launched on journeys, evolutions, developments, that could not be entirely predicted or controlled; we were constantly in motion. In “On the Move,” which Thom wrote in his twenties, are the lines
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.
Thom was still on the move, still full of energy, in his seventies. When I last saw him, in November of 2003, he seemed more intense, not less intense, than the young man of forty years earlier. Back in the 1970s, he had written to me, “I have just had Jack Straw’s Castle published. I cannot guess what my next book will be like.” Boss Cupid was published in 2000, and now, Thom said, he was getting ready for another book but had no idea yet what it would be. He had, so far as I could judge, no thoughts of slowing down or stopping. I think he was moving forward, on the move, till the very minute he died.
—
I fell in love with Manitoulin, a large island in Lake Huron, when I went there in the summer of 1979. I was still trying to work on my exasperating Leg book and had decided to take off on an extended vacation where I could swim, think, write, and listen to music. (I had only two tape cassettes, one of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor and the other of his Requiem. I tend to get fixated on one or two pieces of music sometimes and will play them again and again and again, and these were the two pieces which had played in my mind five years earlier, as I was slowly coming down the mountain with a useless leg.)
I wandered a lot around Gore Bay, the chief town on Manitoulin. I am normally rather shy, but I found myself opening conversations with strangers. I even went to the church on Sunday because I enjoyed the feeling of community. As I was preparing to leave, after an idyllic but not terribly productive six weeks, some of the elders in Gore Bay approached me with an astonishing proposition. They said, “You seem to have enjoyed your stay here; you seem to love the island. Our doctor has just retired after forty years. Would you be interested in taking his place?” When I hesitated, they said that the province of Ontario would give me a house and that—as I had seen—it was a good life on the island.
I was greatly moved by this and thought about it for several days, allowing myself to fantasize about being an island doctor. But then, with some regret, I thought, this cannot work. I am not cut out to be a general practitioner; I need the city, clamorous though it is, and its large, diverse population of neurological patients. I had to say to the elders of Manitoulin, “Thank you—but no.”
This was more than thirty years ago, but I still wonder, sometimes, how life would have been had I said yes to the elders of Manitoulin.
—
Later in 1979, I found a home on a very different island. I heard about City Island, a part of New York City, as soon as I started working at Einstein in the fall of 1965. Only a mile and a half long by half a mile wide, it had the feeling of a New England fishing village, and it felt a world apart from the Bronx, even though it was only ten minutes from Einstein and several of my colleagues lived there. The island had pleasant views of the sea in all directions, and going to one of its many fish restaurants for lunch provided a pleasant break in the day—a d
ay which, if the research was challenging, might be eighteen hours long.
City Island had its own identity, rules, and traditions, and the natives of the island, the “clam diggers,” seemed particularly respectful of idiosyncrasy, whether it was Dr. Schaumburg, a fellow neurologist who had had polio as a child, riding his big tricycle slowly up and down City Island Avenue, or Mad Mary, a woman who became psychotic at intervals and would stand in the back of her pickup truck, preaching hellfire. But Mary was accepted as just another neighbor. Indeed, she seemed to have a special role as a wise woman, a woman whose robust common sense and humor had been forged in the fires of psychosis.
When I was evicted from my apartment at Beth Abraham, I had rented the top floor of a house from a nice couple in Mount Vernon, but I often drove or biked to City Island and Orchard Beach. I would bike down to the beach for a swim on summer mornings before work, and on weekends I would go for long swims, sometimes swimming around City Island, which took about six hours.
It was on such a swim, in 1979, that I spotted a charming-looking gazebo near the end of the island; I got out of the water to look at it and then strolled up the street, where I saw a “For Sale” sign in front of a little house. I knocked on the door, dripping, and met its owner—an ophthalmologist at Einstein. He had just completed his fellowship and was now moving, with his family, to the Pacific Northwest. He showed me around the house (I borrowed a towel so I would not drip inside), and I was hooked. Still in my swim trunks, I strode up City Island Avenue in my bare feet to the realtor’s office and told her I wanted to buy the house.
I had yearned for a house of my own, such as I had rented in Topanga Canyon back in my UCLA days. And I wanted a house by the water so I could put on swim trunks and sandals and walk straight down to the sea. So the little red clapboard house on Horton Street, half a block from the beach, was ideal.
I had no experience of owning a house, and disaster quickly ensued. When I left the house that first winter for a week in London, I did not realize I had to leave the heat on to prevent the pipes from freezing. When I got back from London and opened the front door, I was greeted by an appalling sight. A pipe upstairs had burst and flooded, and the entire ceiling of my dining room hung in tatters over the dining room table. The table and chairs were totally ruined, as was the carpet beneath them.
While I was in London, my father had suggested that I take his piano, now that I had a house; it was a beautiful old Bechstein grand dating from 1895, the year of his birth. He had had it for more than fifty years and had played it daily, but now, in his mid-eighties, his hands were getting crippled by arthritis. A wave of horror passed over me when I saw the devastation, made sharper by the thought that this is where the piano would have been had I got the house earlier in the year.
Many of my neighbors on City Island were sailors. The house next door belonged to Skip Lane and his wife, Doris. Skip had captained large merchant ships for most of his life, and he had a house so full of ship’s compasses and steering wheels, binnacles and lanterns, that it had come to resemble a ship itself. The walls were covered by photographs of vessels he had commanded.
Skip had innumerable yarns of life at sea, but now that he was retired, he had given up his huge ships for a tiny, one-man Sunfish; he often sailed it across Eastchester Bay and thought nothing of sailing it all the way to Manhattan.
Though he must have weighed close to 250 pounds, Skip was enormously strong and amazingly agile. I would often see him fixing things on the roof of his house—I think he liked the feeling of being aloft—and on one occasion, when challenged, he climbed up a thirty-foot pylon of the City Island Bridge, hauling himself up by sheer muscle and then balancing on one of its girders.
Skip and Doris were perfect neighbors, never intrusive, but endlessly helpful where needed, and with a great energy and gusto for life. There were only a dozen or so houses on Horton Street, perhaps thirty of us in all, and insofar as we had a leader, a man of decision, it was Skip.
At one point in the early 1990s, we were warned that a big hurricane was coming our way, and police came with bullhorns telling us to evacuate. But Skip, who knew all the vagaries of storms and sea, and had a voice louder than any police bullhorn, disagreed. “Avast!” he roared. “Stay put!” He invited us all to a hurricane party on his porch at noon, to watch the eye of the hurricane pass over. Just before noon, as Skip had predicted, the wind died down, and a sudden calm and quietness descended. Now, in the eye of the hurricane, the sun shone, the sky was clear—a halcyon, magical calm. Skip told us one could sometimes see birds or butterflies which had been carried thousands of miles, even from Africa, in the eye of the storm.
No one on Horton Street locked their doors. We all looked out for one another and for the little beach we shared. It may have been only a few yards wide, but it was our beach, and every Labor Day we had a party on the tiny patch of sand, with a whole pig roasting slowly on a spit.
I often went for long swims in the bay with another neighbor, David, who had the caution and common sense which I lacked and, on the whole, kept me out of trouble. But I sometimes went too far; once I swam all the way out to the Throgs Neck Bridge and was almost cut in half by a boat. David was shocked when I told him about this and said that if I insisted on swimming (“like an idiot”) in shipping lanes, I should at least tow a bright orange float behind me for visibility.
I sometimes encountered little jellyfish in the waters off City Island. I ignored the slight burning as they brushed against me, but in the mid-1990s much larger jellyfish started to appear: Cyanea capillata, the lion’s mane jellyfish (like the one responsible for a mysterious death in the final Sherlock Holmes story). It was not good to brush against these. They would leave agonizing welts across the skin, along with frightening effects on heart rate and blood pressure. On one occasion, the ten-year-old son of one of my neighbors had a dangerous anaphylactic reaction to being stung; his face and tongue became so swollen that he could hardly breathe, and only a prompt injection of adrenaline saved him.
When the jellyfish plague got worse, I took to swimming in full scuba gear, including a face mask. Only my lips were exposed, and I slathered them with Vaseline. Even so, I got the horrors one day when I found a Cyanea the size of a football in one of my armpits; this was the end of carefree swimming for me.
Every May and June, during the full moon, an ancient and marvelous ceremony was enacted on our beach, as on beaches all over the Northeast, when the horseshoe crabs, creatures little changed from the Paleozoic, clambered slowly up to the water’s edge for their annual mating. Watching this ritual, which had occurred every year for more than 400 million years, I got a vivid feeling for the reality of deep time.
—
City Island was a place to saunter, to stroll around slowly—up and down City Island Avenue, and into its cross streets, each only one or two blocks long. There were many fine old gabled houses going back to Victorian days, and there were still a few shipyards left from its heyday as a yacht-building center. City Island Avenue was lined with seafood restaurants, ranging from the long-established, elegant Thwaite’s Inn to Johnny’s Reef Restaurant, an open-air fish and chips place. My own favorite, quiet and unpretentious, was Spouter’s Inn, with whaling pictures on the walls and pea soup every Thursday. It was Mad Mary’s favorite place, too.
Much of my shyness melted away in this small-town atmosphere. I was on easy first-name terms with the manager of Spouter’s, with the man who ran the gas station, and with the clerks at the post office (they said no one in living memory had sent or received so many letters, and this increased by an order of magnitude when Hat was published).
Sometimes, oppressed by the emptiness and silence of the house, I would go to the Neptune, a curiously uncrowded and unpopular restaurant at the end of Horton Street, and sit there for hours, writing. I think they quite liked their quiet writer, who would order a different dish every half hour or so, because he did not want the restaurant to lose money on his account.
—
Early in the summer of 1994, I was adopted by a stray cat. I got back from the city one evening, and there she was, sitting sedately on my porch. I went into the house and brought out a saucer of milk; she lapped thirstily. Then she looked at me, a look that said, “Thanks, buddy, but I’m hungry, too.”
I refilled the saucer and came back with a piece of fish, and this sealed an unspoken but clear covenant: she would stay with me, if we could arrange a way of living together. I found a basket for her and put it on a table on my front porch, and the next morning, I was happy to see, she was still there. I gave her more fish, left a bowl of milk for her, and took off for work. I waved good-bye to her; I think she understood that I would be back.
That evening, she was there awaiting me; indeed, she greeted me by purring, arching her back, and rubbing herself against my leg. I felt oddly touched when she did this. After the cat had eaten, I settled myself, as I liked to, on a sofa by the porch window, to eat my own dinner. The cat jumped up on her table outside and watched me as I ate.
When I got back the next evening, I put her fish out on the floor again, but this time, for some reason, she would not eat it. When I put the fish on the table, she jumped up, but it was only when I had settled myself on the sofa by the window that the cat, lying parallel to me, now started to eat her supper as I ate mine. So we ate together, in synchrony. I found this ritual, which was to be repeated every evening, remarkable. I think we both had a feeling of companionship—which one might expect with a dog but rarely with a cat. The cat liked to be with me; she would even, after a few days, walk down to the beach with me and sit next to me on a bench there.
