Letters, p.34
Letters, page 34
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It is inconceivable to me (as I am sure it would be to anyone who knows you) that you should become “metalled” or mechanical or “dead inside” as a result of your loss. You will feel, you are feeling, a merciful numbing, which one has to have when the wound is still so fresh and new; this is like the temporary scab which staunches a flow of blood, and which is now gently staunching what would otherwise be a spiritual haemorrhage. But a carapace? No, Bob, this you will never develop. I am sure you need (as do your children) every sort of sympathy + support at this time; probing and examining—I think not now but later.
My friend, I am not the one who needs visiting; I wish I could visit you. But I am still in a cast (tho’ quite active on crutches), and I am told that I must expect not less than 3 months from time of operation (Aug 26) to functioning adequate for self-sufficient existence. So, willy-nilly, I cannot expect to return to New York until the start of December, or thereabouts.
I hope I may visit you when I can move fairly easily, perhaps early in the New Year. And there will be new tomorrows, new years, new life, awaiting you, the other side of the valley.
Yours,
OLIVER
To A. R. Luria
October 19, 1974
Athlone House, Middlesex Hospital Convalescent Home, London[*21]
Dear Professor Luria,
It is a month since I wrote you an outrageously long letter, and I have been eagerly awaiting a reply. But the mails are very slow now—especially at the London end; no doubt a letter from you will arrive in a few days’ time!
I am sitting in the warm October sun as I write; it is a most perfect Autumn day, extraordinary, a miracle (the Convalescent Home is set on a hill, amid woodlands, a little Paradise in the middle of London); and everything round me—the varied colours of the October leaves, the scents of new-mown grass and flowers, the singing of birds, the heaven-blue sky, the pure, sweet, transparent air, the noonday glory of the sun itself—everything in a wonderful and infinite harmony, Nature herself a living song of praise.
And I feel well, wonderfully well, not only with my leg, but in the whole of myself—is not recovery a wonder, an absolute miracle? I keep hearing in my mind some words of Nietzsche (I think they preface The Gay Science—Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft): “Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened…for convalescence was unexpected.” […]
My surgeons, my specialists, did a beautiful job, joining the torn tissues, restoring anatomical connection; but they could not teach me to walk again, to feel my legs, to jump in the air. […]
The real human beings who have helped me to recover, to move, to live, have done so, essentially, by being themselves; not by their words, but by their actions and deeds, by communicating to me their own existence, and then communicating to me the actuality of existence, and even its possibilities, which I had all but forgotten.
Thus, in Norway, where I spent the night in a little cottage hospital following my accident, there came in the next morning a nice country doctor with comfortable old clothes and twinkling eyes. I opened my mouth to speak, but he put a finger to his lips; and then, without warning, without a word, he suddenly jumped onto my bedside table (at least a four-foot standing jump!); then he jumped down, and, without a word, placed my hands on his legs, just above the knees. And there I felt—but you have already guessed!—I felt the scars of bilaterally-sutured quadriceps tendons. “You see,” he said, “it happened to me. Both legs, while skiing. You see, I have made a perfect recovery.” I did indeed; his words were needless. What he did, his deed, was in itself communication enough, communicating the hope of recovery as no words could.
Similarly with a young doctor here, who seemed to understand everything much better than the highly-academic specialists at the University Hospital. One day I asked him, “How come? What gives you your understanding?”; and he said (as I had already guessed!) “Experience. I broke my leg. I spent weeks in a cast. I know some of the problems from my own experience.”
Similarly a young orderly at the convalescent-home, who some years before had smashed his pelvis and legs in a parachute-jump, and been in plaster from the waist down for more than three months. He talked to me—fascinating; and still more valuably, he walked with me, and he promised we will play football together by the time I leave here!
And my dear, wryly-humorous, admirable physiotherapist, who has helped me out of the labyrinth (of weaknesses, fears, disallowals, disbeliefs) more than any other single person.[*22] She could not have done this by the exercise of skill and will alone: she too had been through distresses and disabilities, hers dissimilar to my own. Only through experience can one learn—or teach. […]
To A. R. Luria
June 7, 1975
[No Address Given]
Dear Professor Luria,
I was quite overwhelmed by your letter of May 12. You are far too complimentary, and your praise makes it difficult for me to find the right thing to say.[*23]
You speak of my “deducing a whole philosophical system” from my injury, and later, as being “an outstandingly gifted man”—in being able to make deductions from “events which the ordinary man does not even see.” I feel I must at once disclaim and concede what you say! I think I do, perhaps, have certain gifts, but they are not gifts of intellect or reason as such (I am not particularly “clever,” and my formal abilities are very limited—they certainly would not allow me to deduce a whole philosophical system). But I think I do have a certain gift of “seeing,” of attention, and an obstinate power of holding things in my mind, for days and weeks and years if necessary, until they begin to yield me their secret. In particular, my gift is for detecting inward changes, minute shifts in perception and feeling which the ordinary man doubtless experiences, but which in the ordinary course of events he is unlikely to be concerned with or pay much attention to. My special proclivity is to detect such changes when they are scarcely perceptible, and to not ignore them or dismiss them from my mind; but, on the contrary (and this could be construed as a sort of contrariness!) to fasten on them and focus on them, until they become clearer and clearer—and in so doing, of course, I magnify them, so that they come to fill my whole field of vision.
When I was ten, I developed an absolute passion for astronomy, and it is this sort of passion, I think, which still dominates me today (although it has been transformed and turned inward, so to speak, so that I now find myself bending a minute and ceaseless and rapt attention upon the inner firmament today); but there has been a change of direction, towards subjectivity and inwardness, but with a continuance (I hope!) of the original astronomical precision and passion. Over the years, and almost against my will, I have become a sort of astronomer of the inward, focussing with extreme introspection on my own state-of-mind, but doing this (I like to think!) in order to learn something of other minds, of Mind, and not as a mere egoistic indulgence: for if I am unique—as everyone is unique—I am also very similar to everyone else, and what I observe to occur in myself, must surely occur in others as well. This, at least, is my (the) Credo. […]
By a curious coincidence, rummaging this evening through some oddments of Leibniz, I came upon a strangely similar image, contained in his description of a half-Platonic, half-scientific dream: “I was no longer in the cave, I no longer saw a vault above me, but found myself on a high mountain which revealed to me the face of the earth. I saw in this distance everything that I wished to look at…but when I considered a particular place fixedly, immediately it grew, and in order to see it as if close at hand, I needed no other telescope than my attention.” My own special gift, then (and how often it seems like a burden or curse!) is far from being analytic and deductive, and perhaps equally far from being empirical and inductive; it is—existential: it starts from the most concrete, particular and individual experience, and then burrows downwards and inwards, towards the most general determinants of existence and action. Thus, I do not feel that I am ascending to deductions, nor do I feel that I am extending to deductions; I feel that I am descending, deeper and deeper, towards the bedrock, the foundation, of my experiences. I think that deductions and inductions involve a departure, a moving-away from the grounds of experience, whereas my own “method” is to stand still on the same spot, the ground of my experience, until I “discover,” explicitly, what sort of ground it is:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time…[*24]
[…]
Yours sincerely,
Oliver Sacks
To A. R. Luria
June 14, 1975
11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY
Dear Professor Luria,
I fear I have been a nuisance with my enormous letters and precipitate telegrams—I cannot thank you enough for the unfailing understanding, good nature, kindness and tact with which you have received, and at once responded to, my various (and perhaps, sometimes, half-mad!) communications.
I often wonder what one man can really do for another in this odd world of ours. It is clear what he cannot do (and should never attempt to do): he cannot be another person, nor can he tell another how to be, or how to think or feel or act; and he cannot coerce, or cajole another without compromising the proper relation of mutuality. What then can he do? He can be himself (quietly embodying, without ostentation, the cardinal qualities of curiosity and courage, of a bold and honest and persistent striving in the face of all difficulties (and doubts) which assail him). And he can convey some of his qualities to another human being: that is, he can inspire him, entrust him, and—above all—encourage him. And it is exactly this which you showed me, and conveyed to me, in your magnanimous letter of May 12, and […] it is what you have been, and done, since we first corresponded. […]
There is one specific point (or a nexus of points) which you bring up in your letter of May 12, and which I have been thinking on very intensely, because it touches on the deepest parts, the mainspring, of my character and thought; namely, what is the sort of passion which drives one, and what is the sort of gift one possesses?
I think there are good images in the analogy of certain “Adventure” and “Detective” stories (to which I am addicted—and to which, I sometimes suspect, you also turn occasionally as well!). And one of the things which delights me in Kierkegaard is that he often refers to himself as a sort of detective—a detective of inwardness, a detective of the soul. And surely many of the images here—the sense of MYSTERY (and suspicion), the finding of CLUES, the way in which one TRACES events to their origin (however impossible or paradoxical they may seem!)—surely these images have a great (and comic) relevance to the endeavours of Science: to the Psychology and the Structure of INVESTIGATION as such. What is so entertaining with regard to the “classic” Detectives—Poe’s “Dupin,” Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” et al.—is their wilful (or whimsical) misunderstanding of the methods they actually use. Thus both of these pretend to be “entirely scientific,” “rational,” etc.—and when they come to expatiate on their methods they portray themselves as engaging in long trains of systematic and deductive thought, or as sifting and “analysing” a great mass of evidence, calculating, comparing, computing probabilities, and then proceeding to inductive conclusions. But is this not utter nonsense, post factum rationalization? It is not in the least the way they actually work—anymore than it is the way creative scientists work! (Sherlock Holmes, at work, is like an excited dog “on the trail”!)
Do you know the “Father Brown” stories of G. K. Chesterton? These give, to my mind, a much funnier (and more penetrating, and truer) picture of the motives and methods of the Master-Detective, and the deeply irrational and paradoxical (sometimes crazy!) way he works.
You speak in your letter of my “gift” for seeing “events which an ordinary man does not (may not) even see,” and my going on to ponder on these. Such a “gift” could be a genuine and more-than-ordinary sensitivity or it could be, as they say, “an over-active imagination”—“invention,” “illusion,” seeing what’s not there: Such an ambiguity envelops all such terms as “a gift,” “a sixth sense,” “a third ear,” etc.
What you say here in admiring belief, my surgeon said in amazed disbelief: he said “Sacks—you’re unique! I’ve never heard anything like this before. You see things which none of my other patients ever mentioned to me!” I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or insulted, and after a few seconds I replied to him: “I may feel certain things abnormally acutely, but this doesn’t mean that others don’t feel them, because they don’t mention them, at all. I refuse to believe that I am constitutionally unique! I bet other patients go through similar things.” […]
I had many similar experiences when I tried to describe and publish some of the extraordinary phenomena shown and experienced by my post-encephalitic patients, such as some of the things I describe in Awakenings. In 1969 I saw things which I myself could scarcely believe, and when I started to describe some of them the following year I met with an almost-universal distrust and disbelief—at least among my neurological colleagues. A number of them expressed their incredulity in print; to those who did this I extended invitations to visit “Mount Carmel.” “Come and see for yourselves,” I wrote to them: none of them ever came; apparently, they didn’t want to see—at least this was the conclusion to which I was forced. […]
And yet: I could demonstrate the “incredible” to my students every week; furthermore, I could demonstrate them (and did) to lots of “ordinary” people—relatives of the patients, volunteers who came in from the neighborhood to help, the hospital electrician, the hospital gardener. I found again and again, by a singular paradox, that “plain,” “simple,” “ordinary” people believed their eyes, and were much more receptive, than many highly-trained and “cerebral” colleagues (who seemed blinded by their own language and methods and mental habits and assumptions—so much so as to be incapable of experience, or listening with an open mind to the experience of others).
This is why, finally, I addressed Awakenings to “ordinary” people, and why it is “ordinary” people, on the whole, who have responded to it with appreciation and interest. […] And this is why Kierkegaard, who himself was such an extraordinary man, such an oddity and genius, spent hours every day talking to “ordinary” people in the streets of Copenhagen; and why in the very last thing he ever wrote (which, sadly, was only published after his death), he said: “Thou plain man! I have not separated my life from thine; thou knowest it, I have lived in the street, am known to all…if I belong anywhere, I must belong to thee, thou plain man…I was always of your company”; and, in his final words, speaking of the profound and absolute paradox of faith, he brings the greatest and the plainest together: “It is infinitely high…but it is possible to all.” I desire and believe the same of myself: I have been given certain gifts—less of intellect than of seeing, and of saying what it is I have seen; but I feel I am of the company of plain men—and my gifts are theirs, if in higher degree; I am not set-apart, but am united, by my gifts; I see what he sees, but with clearer eyes; I experience what he experiences, and I say it for him. If I have been superiorly endowed, my endowments are employed for the sake of the plain man. I don’t give a damn for “intellectuals,” “specialists,” “experts,” etc.; I seek to give voice to the universals of experience, to see and speak clearly what everyone feels.[*25]
And yet—I cannot pretend that I am simply and merely “the man in the street”; I am “in the street,” in the world, existent, but I am also a thinker, which most people are not; and, in particular, I am a thinker who thinks (tries to think) of existence. […]
I need to make clear the extreme practical importance of an “inward” approach, the power-to-help which comes from understanding precisely what patients are “going through”—the inward determinants of their outward behaviour. If we can get “inside” the patient, a new sort of understanding is rendered possible, and along with this—a new sort of therapy. […] With regard to the phenomena of negated and alienated parts of the body, an enormous amount of suffering and disability might be avoided, or reduced, if only some understanding were extended to such things. […]
Again, for example, with my Parkinsonian patients, by patiently trying to get “inside” these patients, I have learned that a great many of the external phenomena of Parkinsonism—movements which are too fast, too slow, too big, or too small—arise from the inwardness of the Parkinsonian experience, in particular from peculiar distortions of space and time-sense, illusions about the “scale” of movement. […]
Once one grasps that such Parkinsonian phenomena have this “inward” foundation, then, and only then, can one help patients to regulate their irregular movements by providing them with non-pathological metrics or frames-of-reference. […]
Yesterday I was talking with a cousin of mine, a highly gifted (and verbal) woman who three years ago was rendered aphasic by a stroke, but mercifully made a perfect (or near-perfect) recovery—I asked her yesterday how she got better: whether language seemed to come back of its own “spontaneously”—or whether she had to struggle to regain her words.[*26]
“Both,” she said, “I had to struggle for words to come, but they would only come if they were ‘ready’ to come. But their readiness-to-come was connected with my readiness-to-fight.” She continued, “My recovery was like a miracle—I experienced in myself the miraculous rebirth of language.”
