Letters, p.76
Letters, page 76
I have also worked with the Little Sisters of the Poor for more than thirty years—their three Homes in New York for the Elderly and the Poor. A majority of their residents have some of the disabilities which tend to go with age—blindness, deafness, strokes, dementia etc (tho’ others are very intact, and have entered in order to have company and community…and [perhaps] a religious structure). The Little Sisters Homes, in the States, and elsewhere (the Order was founded in France, rapidly spread to England—Dickens wrote about them in the 1840’s) originally had something akin to the Victorian architecture and great spaces of older State Hospitals—tho’ these fine, high-ceilinged buildings have been largely abandoned now (as being “fire-traps,” etc, too expensive to renovate, easier to demolish).
In England I would visit the Highlands Hospital—built in the 1880’s as a fever hospital, covering many acres, and with low, isolated huts (as well as a main building) for hundreds, even thousands, of patients with infectious diseases. It was turned over for postencephalitic patients in the 1920’s (when I visited it with De Niro in 1989–90—he was “studying” then to “be” a postencephalitic—there were only a handful of patients left in the once overflowing Wards, and the place was shut down three years later). And my (schizophrenic) brother was often a patient at Colney Hatch/Friern Barnet Hospital—the largest “Lunatic Asylum” in England (with more than 3000 patients at one point)—this too was closed in the 1990’s. I used to visit him there.
Not to forget—Caenwood/Kenwood—the beautiful Convalescent Home on Hampstead Heath, in London, where I spent six weeks as a patient in 1974 (and which I wrote about in A Leg to Stand On). This seemed to me an “asylum” in the very best sense of the word—very different from the sense of “Total Institution” (used by Goffman, Rothman etc). Given the stereotypes of snake-pit, etc. one wants to bring out—as did some of the employees you spoke to—the good (and crucial) aspects of Asylums, as well as the dreadful ones.
* * *
—
I am rambling—and this is the point. That I am not sure how much my own scattered, rambling reminiscences can be cohered into a Foreword for your book (tho’ I started having a go at writing one, and will continue)—especially as so much of my experience has been in Asylums for the Poor and Elderly, the Neurologically Disabled, the Convalescent, etc. rather than Lunatic Asylums. But give me your thoughts![*24]
Again, I am continually taken aback by the beauty and eloquence of your pictures…and now your Introduction matches these.
Best,
Oliver
To Robert John Aumann
Cousin, Mathematician
September 11, 2008
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Robert John,
Many thanks for your postcard. I am glad you liked my little piece on Darwin,[*25] and I instantly accessed your (quite wonderful!) interview with Sergiu Hart,[*26] as you suggested.
It gives such a rich picture of your intellectual life and trajectory (trajectories)—and has set me thinking in various directions, especially about games-theory in relation to natural selection (it seems obvious once this is mentioned, both being optimizing devices/strategies), the coordination of neurons, etc. It has made me rethink the whole notion of “rationality,” and the unifying power of a Center for rationality.[*27] And there is an equally rich picture of your emotional and family and social and collegial life—complemented by the splendid photos of you and colleagues, you and family, etc.
And specifically—this, perhaps, was a main reason for your suggesting it—the interview is fascinating—and moving—for your exploration of the questions “You are a deeply religious man. How does it fit in with a rational view of the world? How do you fit together science and religion?”
This is something I have always been tempted to bring up with you, but always steered away from.
I often worry on this score, for (especially here, in the States) there are passionate attempts to replace natural selection/evolution by Creationism and “Intelligent Design” etc, to replace natural models of reality by supernatural ones. This is bound to lead to conflict and contradiction—and worse. What you bring out beautifully, and with all sorts of examples (intellectual, moral, aesthetic etc) is that a rational religion does not seek models of reality, but has quite other concerns—and in this sense is “orthogonal” to science.
How, even in a purely aesthetic sphere (tho’ is anything “purely” aesthetic?), like playing the piano (which I have started doing for hours a day, since engaging a piano teacher, my first in more than sixty years), science cannot say all that much, or needs to be very modest and circumspect (I worry about the grandiosity of “neuroesthetics,” “neuroethics,” etc) and about the over-inclusiveness of E. O. Wilson’s “consilience,” which (it seems to me) aims to scientize everything in human life, everything in the world. (Perhaps this is a perennial temptation for some scientists, not excluding very great ones.)
The notion of “self-commitment” seems central to you—but this is quite different from a “categorical imperative,” because it depends on choice, freedom of will (and this, as you say, God leaves to us). I especially loved your descriptions of the Sabbath, observing it, feeling it, in its fullest sense—not just a legalistic observation, but one which can only spring from a true religious feeling.
I fear I do not feel this myself, perhaps because in the mildly observant family in which I grew up, Shabbos was relatively dilute, somewhat attenuated; but I see how it could be felt—(and perhaps was felt by you, in a much more orthodox family, from the start)—and it makes me wistful.
I have to think on these matters, which I have not really done—I hesitate to write, but feel that a letter like this, rambling and disconnected as it is, is better than none.
With warmest good wishes,
Love,
Oliver
PS The next time you are in New York I hope I can bring my friend Ralph Siegel to dinner (you met him, briefly, at a birthday of mine). Ralph is a very good neuroscientist, but has also become quite orthodox (and Talmud-loving) in the last few years—and this he attributes to an Erev Shabbat he spent with my brother Marcus and his family in Sydney. For him, then, the sense of the Sabbath’s beauty, and specialness, served as a path to religion.
To John Horgan
Science Journalist, Author of The End of Science
December 8, 2008
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear John,
Thanks for your Dec. 5 email. I enjoyed the event and think we made a good “team”![*28]
On the matter of “stage fright” I am somewhat ignorant, despite (or because) I suffer from it myself—perhaps less than I did, but nonetheless significantly. That is to say, I find my heart is racing a bit, my palms sweat, and my fingers and toes get icy. But within a minute or two of actually facing the audience, I (nearly always) feel different—and start to enjoy myself. Though people sometimes recommend beta-blockers […] for the anxiety and the autonomic effects, I have never taken these—partly because I feel that this sort of tension, unpleasant though it is, is (for me, at least) a prerequisite of performing well. I do, however, need to be alone, or with a supportive or congenial presence, for half an hour or so before any talk or “performance.” I can’t bear moving straight from a social situation to a performance one. My sentiments are exactly those of (the younger) Bragg:[*29]
A good lecture is a tour de force; a good lecturer should be keyed up to a high pitch of nervous tension before it and limp and exhausted after it…If a sensitive lecturer is to give of his best, he must be left in peace for a period before the lecture starts. It is the refinement of cruelty to expect him to be social.
* * *
—
And I find I need—as perhaps we all do—a strong basic structure, along with the freedom to improvise at any point.
Best,
Oliver
To Nick Younes
March 3, 2010
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Nick,
How nice to get a typewritten letter—an extinct species, these days—and to visualize you with a Selectric on your lap.
Anne[*30] sent us a detailed account of your incredible blizzard, and how she feared a tree would fall on the house. Many years ago—the day after reunification, when Kate and I went to Leipzig (which, unchanged from 1940, looked as if it were frozen in a time-warp), it started to snow, and snow, and snow…and we were deliciously marooned there for almost a week, and felt very grateful to the snow. A similar feeling was expressed by Auden, in his poem “Thank You, Fog.”
I can imagine that with a computer you are “plugged in” 24/7—continual (but also dangerous) distraction—I am besieged by e-mail, tho’ Kate filters 90% of them out. I see how one can never feel alone with one of those infernal machines going, and, sometimes, one needs to (have you read Anthony Storr’s book Solitude?).
In regard to reading and writing I am the opposite to you. I can write non-stop (at rare, happy times) for hours—once, travelling to London, I was so absorbed that I noticed nothing external to me between Kennedy and Heathrow; as we were touching down I said to the stewardess “You didn’t serve me any dinner!” She said she had, but that I had eaten “absentmindedly,” and without pausing in my writing. I tend to find reading, on the other hand, continually interrupted by my own thoughts—autochthonously, or related to what I am reading—
You seem (if I do not misunderstand you) to speak of gathering facts, metaphors, etc as material for some future book, theory or synthesis. Surely they arouse associations, are in some sense integrated, as you incorporate them. But, in another sense (I imagine it is the same with all thinking people) they may be put away in some mental attic or basement until their time comes.
I have to stop now—I have been standing[*31] at my desk for the last 8 hours—I look forward to seeing you (and will read some Euripides).
Love,
Oliver
To Revella Levin
Psychotherapist
June 1, 2010
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Revella,
Thank you for your nice letter—your letters are always full of fire and interest.
I added a little to my “Asylum” piece (for the NY Rev. Books); and yes, I went to Geel, too briefly, and also enclose a copy of my foreword to a fine book by Eugeen Roosens (Geel Revisited). (And I have heard of similar places, going back centuries, in Morocco and Japan.) I wonder if my schizophrenic brother could have had a better life with community support, instead of being doped (and, in the 1990s, shocked—insulin coma) out of his mind the whole time. (I once tried Haldol myself, and felt like a zombie.)
I say a little about the two-facedness of “tranquillizers” in my Mars book—copy enclosed—but it seems to me that the matter is very complex and individual, and “need” must be balanced against “tolerance.” There can be cruel and tragic dilemmas, as with my Awakenings patients and l-DOPA.
This has been a rather difficult six months for me. A total knee replacement tipped me (perhaps literally, because of the asymmetry) into an excruciating sciatica, and I had to have a laminectomy. Between these two operations I was effectively immobilized and housebound (unable to sit, so couldn’t travel or go out).[*32] Things are easing now, and I am getting slowly back to a more normal life, which includes swimming. (I find this easier, and safer, than walking.) Three days before the knee surgery I had a hemorrhage in my right (melanoma) eye, and lost the sight in it completely. I am due to have a vitrectomy next week, and perhaps that will restore a little vision.
I would have been depressed by this accumulation of problems had I not been able to write, and this has kept me going. I have completed one book, The Mind’s Eye, about visual perception and some of its vicissitudes, and ¾ written another (Seeing Things)[*33] on visual hallucinations.
Since you are kind enough to ask, I enclose the (uncorrected) proof of my own visual story from Mind’s Eye. The others are more upbeat—tales of accommodation, even transcendence, in face of adversity.
My best,
Oliver
To Revella Levin
July 2, 2010
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Val,
A very short letter, because I have had two eye operations in the past three weeks, and reading is very difficult at this point.
I was most interested in your letter where you speak of Luria and the (so brief!) welcoming of psychoanalysis in the USSR. Luria himself speaks of his excitement when, as a nineteen-year-old, he got a letter from Freud.
I started to read your discussion of “Bathsheba,” found it fascinating, but was/am not up to finishing it till my eyes are better.
I am not sure that I have ever spoken of schizophrenia as “curable” or “incurable”—these are not useful words here. I think that many people with schizophrenia can be “helped,” whether by analysis, supportive therapy, drugs, living in therapeutic communities, or all of these (as described by my gifted schizophrenic namesake Elyn Saks in her remarkable memoir The Center Cannot Hold; Elyn has given our more rigidly biological psychiatry colleagues something to think about). You yourself speak carefully, modestly, about moving people in schizophrenic bind and torments to…to the sort of neurosis we all have to live with. As yet, I have never really explored the schizophrenias—I am only a neurologist! I enclose a current piece.
My best,
Oliver
To Revella Levin
July 9, 2010 (77 Today!) [Not Sent]
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Val,
Thanks for your latest letter—I do like the image of (my) producing champagne from pickles.
Among other birthday mail (and e-mail) I got a letter from Jane Goodall whom I love and admire (how can one not?), and this made me think of the passion and steadfastness of her commitment to (the understanding, the lives, and now the almost-desperate plight of) chimpanzees—see her July 8 article (attached)—and her “advocacy” of/for them, for all imperiled species and life-forms.
I cannot help contrasting my 50+ years as a physician with her 50 years as a biologist/naturalist. Do I have any commitment comparable to hers? I could say that I do, that I have a commitment to the well-being of my patients, and of those who suffer, are tormented, are ignored, or misunderstood, or marginalization, etc. generally—and that I write about them with sympathy and force, so that their situations may be more widely known and understood. In this sense all I have written is a form of “advocacy,” and this continues in the forthcoming book—perhaps, especially, in my piece on the face-blind (it too will be in the New Yorker soon), where I emphasize that this can afflict 2–3% of the population with such severity that they have great difficulty recognizing anyone (even, sometimes, their own reflection in a mirror), and may become quite socially withdrawn or otherwise limited in their relationships as a result. This is not generally known: it will be after my article appears. In this sense I will be an “advocate” for the face-blind.
On the question of reading: the problem is not just that one eye is blind, but that the other eye has moderately dense cataracts, and I fear to have it operated on, not having (so to speak) an eye to spare.
My best,
Oliver
To David Remnick
Editor in Chief, The New Yorker
March 1, 2012
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear David,
I was very pleased and thrilled—and reassured!—by your response to Hallucinations (for at my age there are always the fears of declining powers and senile repetition). (Do you know a fabulous and very funny book called Losing It by William Miller?)
I never intended an entire book on hallucinations, only the first piece (on Charles Bonnet syndrome), but it grew and grew, almost against my will. I certainly didn’t intend the “Altered States” chapter, but was persuaded, when I was in hospital last year, and unable to write, to reminisce and tell stories of my drug-taking days; so the personal parts of this chapter were told (to a friend who transcribed them), not written—but, conceivably, this made them more alive. I am glad you have selected this chapter, but a little nervous too, since I am “outing” myself here as a (former) drug-taker. I hope the first half of the piece is not too drastically edited—I think one needs some of the historical-cultural background—tho’ I can see for myself how a couple of thousand words can be cut—and John Bennet has always been a marvellous and sensitive editor to me. The book will not come out till after the Election in November. Again, all my thanks for liking and taking this piece, as so many before—
