Letters, p.57
Letters, page 57
To Stephen Wiltshire
Artist
July 18, 1990
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Stephen,
Your wonderful drawing of our old house in London (and of the room inside) just arrived. This was the house I was born in, the house I have known all my life—and your drawing (which was so exact, and so full of feeling) will bring it back to me, remind me of it, for the rest of my life.
I am very sorry I was not there when you were drawing it that day—especially as it was my birthday as well. But I was very glad to see you the previous weekend, and delighted we could spend a little time together. How is the fish your sister bought? That was a lovely little drawing of it you did in my notebook.
I couldn’t see you when you were drawing our old house in London because I was already in Rome, in Italy (which is very different from Venice, where you had gone earlier). Rome is full of OLD buildings and ruins—some of them are more than 2000 (two thousand) years old! People have tried to imagine what Rome was once like, how the buildings must have looked in Ancient Rome long ago—I enclose two such “reconstructions” of how Rome might have looked (and if you ever come to Rome you can see the original models, which are wonderful and fill a whole room). I hope you may have a go at drawing the Colosseum—or to give it its proper (Latin) name, Amphitheatrum Flavium Constantini Aetate, this incredible round building, with statues in the arches, where fifty thousand people (as many as a football crowd!) could watch gladiators or horses. Or you could try and draw some of the old buildings in ancient Rome (Roma Imperiale).
I think your new book (Floating Cities) is going to be just beautiful—and (who knows?) you may do a fourth book, of ancient Rome and other cities (Athens, Jerusalem, etc.)—a book of cities as they once were, and can be reconstructed: a book of Ancient Cities.
I hope you, and your mother, and your sister, are all well—and I look forward to seeing you again when I next come to London.
I hope you are enjoying life—and your new school.
You were a wonderful companion when we all went to Russia together!
Best wishes,
Oliver
To Hugh S. Moorhead
Philosopher[*28]
November 11, 1990
119 Horton St., City Island, NY
Dear Professor Moorhead,
Many thanks for your charming letter—I am glad you are enjoying Hat, and happy to inscribe your copy. (I think, however, my best book is Awakenings—a new edition comes out next month—which is, perhaps, even more explicitly concerned with SURVIVAL, psychic survival, transcendence, in the face of lifelong, devastating, sometimes grotesque illness.)
Though I seem to write about disability and disease, I am always concerned with patients’ ability, and will to survive—to make meaning, and dignity etc. out of their so-shattered lives. (And this is surely the moral theme of A. R. Luria’s wonderful book The Man with a Shattered World.) In this sense I find my patients an inspiration.
When moods of defeat, despair, accidie and “So-what-ness” visit me (they are not infrequent!), I find a sense of hope and meaning in my patients, who do not give up despite devastating disease. If they who are so ill, so without the usual strengths and supports and hopes, if they can be affirmative—there must be something to affirm, and an inextinguishable power of affirmation within us.
I think “the meaning of life” is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us. (This search is quite explicit even in retardates, as with Rebecca—see Hat, p. 185.)
It clearly has to do with love—what and whom and how one can love. I only feel alive, discern “meaning,” when (in some sense) I am in love. The object of love need not necessarily be human—my own most passionate loves, for years, were in physics and chemistry, and these remain for me as something to go back to.
I do not think that love is “just an emotion,” but that it is constitutive in our whole mental structure (and, therefore, in the development of our brains). (I was very delighted with a recent book Love and its Place in Nature, by Jonathan Lear.)
I envy those who are able to find meanings—above all, ultimate meanings—from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to “believe” and “belong.”
I woke this morning with an oddly-happy feeling (from a dream of which all but the “mood” was forgotten) with an intense sense that it was Sunday, that church bells were ringing, that it was time to go, with my family, and neighbours, to church. Thus my Sundays, indeed all my days, would be ordered, centered, consecrated, given meaning. Then, as I awoke fully, the feeling went away—it was not Sunday, I am Jewish, and I have not been to synagogue since being a child (and even then, it seems to me, with more wistfulness than conviction).
(My old father died, at almost 95, a few weeks ago—and going to synagogue, reading the Bible, was central in his life, and gave him comfort, orientation, “meaning,” to the end. I have just returned from gathering-together his effects—hence, I imagine, the timing of my dream and mood.)
I do not find, for myself, that any steady sense of “meaning” can be provided by any cultural institution, or any religion, or any philosophy, or (what might be called) a dully “materialistic” Science. I am excited by a different vision of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order as the “center” of the universe. I find David Layzer’s book Cosmogenesis: The Growth of Order in the Universe particularly cogent and pleasing.
I know that human beings (and perhaps all organisms, at least from frogs up), and their nervous systems, are built to generalize and learn from experience, tho’ obviously only human beings need or devise “philosophies.”
I have, especially in the past, been excited by philosophies—I felt, with an intense reading of Kant in 1979, that everything was illuminated by his philosophy. The feeling, however, did not outlast 1979—and I have had a certain sense of philosophical disillusion and “dryness” since then.
In conclusion, I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or “remember”) it when I am “inspired” by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History.
I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.”
But—being who I am (and not, say, an Einstein), I need constant human contact, and above all, contact with my patients, to re-affirm the sense that life indeed has meaning. Meaning is given to me, daily, in seeing patients, and in practising as a physician—and in trying to be (in Nietzsche’s words) “a philosophical physician.”
I have exhausted my pen—and doubtless your eyesight and patience—with this rambling, floundering letter; and, on top of this, I have not answered “the question”! But life, for me, is rambling and floundering, sometimes creatively, to some never-attained goal, but to hopefully some higher level of understanding and integration. This struggle is, for me, the motive and meaning of life.
You know, you did write to me (I think) some years ago, when you were researching your book. I may have failed to reply because I was feeling depressed, or nihilistic in regard to life’s “meaning.”
This reply is too confused and contradictory, I suspect, to pull anything out of it. But you are welcome to try!
With all best wishes to you—and thanks!
Oliver Sacks
To Lillian Tighe
Last of the Postencephalitic Patients
November 21, 1990
299 West 12th St., New York[*29]
Dear Lillian,
Sorry I have been out of touch—I have been travelling almost constantly. My mind, however, has been very much on Awakenings—and on you. It was marvellous (and brave!) of you to put up with us all—to allow all these visits to you in your place, and, even more, to come out to the set in Brooklyn. Everyone there admired your humor and spirit, and how strongly and gracefully you live, despite the long illness. You were really an inspiration in making the film—and I have said this in this new edition of Awakenings, especially in its final pages (pages 385–6). (You will find further references to yourself on pages 63n, 245n, 271n, 313, 315, and 369: and an acknowledgement on page xiv.)
I very much hope it is possible for you to come to a preview of the film, scheduled to be shown in a theater downtown here on Dec 6.
Again, all my thanks, all my best wishes—and hopes to see you again soon.
Oliver
To Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionary Biologist, Author of The Mismeasure of Man
December 21, 1990
299 West 12th St., New York
Dear Professor Gould,
An early-morning malaise was instantly turned into delight on finding an inscribed copy of Wonderful Life from you, and your notes inside. I had often wanted to write to you—for I have admired you for many years, and try never to miss your articles in Natural History—but always felt too diffident: but now you have given me the opportunity!
Specifically, when preparing a new edition of Awakenings (which I herewith enclose) I found myself thinking hard about history, and about the “evolution” of illness, neurological syndromes, responses to l-DOPA, etc, and feeling more and more that a theory of contingency was needed. Three (?four) such approaches excited me: those of chaos (and?catastrophe) theory—which, in a preliminary form, got worked up into my Appendix #6; that of Edelman (which found its way into “Neurology & The Soul,” my NYRB piece); and your (and Eldredge’s)[*30] theory of punctuated equilibrium—though it seemed to me that you were moving (in Wonderful Life) to a still-more general theory of history and contingency. I originally had in mind three Appendices to Awakenings—a Chaos-Catastrophe one, a “weather” one, an “Edelman” one, and a “Gould” one—but through laziness, or stupidity, I did not or could not carry through this idea—and reference to you, instead of being an essay, or a reconsideration of the whole book, as it should have been, only emerged in a tiny footnote (on p. 230). At a deeper level I suppose I remain unsure as to how to relate your evolutionary-phylogenetic considerations with ontogenetic ones—hence my inability (at this time) to say anything more on the subject. On this, as on so many subjects, I would love to meet you, and talk with you.
My own first love was biology (and palaeontology)—I spent a great part of my adolescence in the (fossil invertebrate galleries of the) Natural History Museum, in London. (And I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday.) The sense of diversity—of the wonder of innumerable forms of life—has always thrilled me beyond anything else; and I partly see my patients (some of them, at least) as “forms of life,” and not just as “damaged” or “defective” or “abnormal,” etc. My oldest friend is Erik Korn, whom you know; he and I, and Jonathan Miller (we were all at school together) had an absolute passion for taxonomy—Erik’s special passion was for holothurians, Jonathan’s for polychaetes, mine for cephalopods. How much greater this would have been had we not been constrained by the “old” view of the Burgess shale![*31] Erik was overwhelmed by Wonderful Life—he wanted to review it, I know (but may have been too overwhelmed, and I know it filled him with a sort of regret for the life in Zoology which he gave up for books—though, really, his life is still, equally, if through books, in Zoology).
I did not know that you had an autistic son—he sounds quite extraordinary. I am bewildered and dissatisfied by all the different approaches and theories etc. there are about autism—I had been going to review half-a-dozen books on the subject for the NYRB, but got cold feet as I found what a battleground the whole subject was, and an exacerbated sense of my own inexperience and inadequacy. I have spent a lot of time recently with Stephen Wiltshire, an enormously gifted autist-artist in England, and hope I can say or show something of his mind, his singularity, his “style,” at a deeper level than anything I have written on the subject—tho’ here I find myself prevaricating and postponing, because I cannot pretend I really understand what goes on inside him. I do not know if you have seen any of his drawings—his third book of drawings is being published (in England) next month—(and he is only just sixteen now!).
Again, my deepest thanks for your book and notes—and for everything you have written over the years. I do hope we can meet in the New Year,
With kindest regards,
Oliver Sacks
* * *
—
Early in 1991, due to budget cuts, New York State laid off or asked for the resignations of twelve hundred doctors, nurses, and other employees of psychiatric hospitals statewide, including one in the Bronx where OS had worked since 1966. Many were appalled by this further deterioration in the already minimal services available to those with serious mental illness. The following was OS’s response to receiving an “employee horizontal reassignment form.”
To New York State Office of Mental Health
January 22, 1991
I do not resign my position at a hospital where I have worked for 24 years. You will have to fire me! Nor am I prepared to appropriate anyone else’s job.
Oliver Sacks, M.D.
* * *
—
And in a letter to his English colleague Gerald Stern a few months later, OS wrote:
Being laid off at the State Hospital does not matter to me that much (though I will miss many patients, whom I had got to know well in my quarter-century there), but these lay-offs and cut-backs throughout the State, and the States, are going to have a disastrous effect on medical care in general here. As you say about the NHS, this is partly the inevitable collapse of romantic notions—but much else too.
To Nancy Best
Correspondent[*32]
May 5, 1991
299 West 12th St., New York
Dear Ms. Best,
I was touched by your letter, its sensitivity and obvious concern. I am less sure how to reply to it, and not sure at all how you will like my reply. […]
I am glad you liked the chapter on Organized Chaos, and this is exactly where I might organize a reply. It so happened that the very day I received your letter I heard that Ilya Prigogine[*33] was lecturing in New York. His first lecture (damn it!) I missed, the second was a revelation. To see this great old man, so calm, with a piece of chalk in his hand, writing up differential equations and weaving them and his thoughts into poetry, bringing together a tremendous, luminous synthesis of the universe—that was a wonder. I found this, I found him, a great comfort, a comforter—I wanted to run out in the streets afterwards shouting “It’s all OK. It’s all alright! I have it on the highest authority!”—and the feeling of reassurance, of bliss almost, stayed through the weekend.
In particular, he presented (in theory, in outline) a picture of a completely self-organizing universe—self-organizing from the Big Bang, through galaxies and chemical compounds, through higher and higher levels of nervous activity, to the human brain and mind: all this in terms of unstable dynamical systems which, if they tend to chaos, also tend to self-organizing structures (what he calls “dissipative structures”). At one point he said “Nature is like a gigantic brain”—and that gave us all a shiver, a sense of awe.
It seems to me (but perhaps this is only becoming clear now, in our time and generation) that the origin and evolution of the universe (up to and including the human mind-brain) is entirely explicable in natural terms, specifically in terms of such self-organizing systems. Nature itself is seen as active, unlike the passive, clock-like Nature of Paley[*34] (which needed a clockmaker). Or to use Nietzsche’s metaphor: “The world is a work of art that is creating itself”—it paints itself, it stands in no need of a Painter. I myself do not feel anything missing in this picture, or any need to posit a creative Spirit. Nor, I think, have I ever felt that need—at least in terms of the creation of Nature and Man.
Having said this, I do recognize a need and quest for a sense of the timeless, of Eternity; for a sense of Peace; and transcendent wonder. I understand well what Auden meant when he used to refer to the world as “a Sacred Allegory.” Or, at least, there are times when I know what all of these things mean—and then they vanish, and leave a sense of desolation. So, perhaps, there is hope for this soul yet!
Again, all my thanks for your fine letter,
With kind regards,
Oliver Sacks
To Marsha Ivins
Astronaut
July 10, 1991
299 West 12th St., New York
Dear Marsha Ivins,
It was a pleasure and a privilege meeting you at the Aeronautical and Space Museum last weekend, and hearing (tantalizingly briefly!) about some of your experiences in your twelve days in space. As a neurologist, and one especially interested in “body-image” and the way(s) in which one perceives one’s own body, in different circumstances, I could not help feeling that you must have acquired a unique experience (and insight) into such things.
