Letters, p.77
Letters, page 77
My best,
Oliver
To Pam Belluck
Health and Science Writer, The New York Times
September 9, 2012
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Pam Belluck,
I am reading Island Practice with great enjoyment—I think you capture the flavor of Nantucket, and of a very original doctor, perfectly.
Reading it brings back a vivid memory from 1979. I too love islands, and the previous year I had spent six weeks in Gore Bay, Manitoulin,[*34] swimming, writing, wandering all over the island—when I returned in ’79 the islanders had a proposition: You seem to love us here in Manitoulin, they said, and we love you. Our doctor, a New Zealander, has just retired. How would you feel about staying on here, and being our doctor? (or words to this effect). When I hesitated, they added, “The Province of Ontario would provide you with a house—and it’s a good life here, as you’ve seen for yourself.” I allowed myself to phantasy being an island doctor—island practice—for a couple of days, and then expressed my regrets. But your beautiful book brings all this back to me, and wondering how life would have been had I stayed on as their doctor.
I sense your own deep feeling for Nantucket, and Lepore, and all the other “characters” in your book.
With thanks and best wishes,
Oliver Sacks
To Marc Bekoff
Biologist
September 27, 2012
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Marc,
This will be a preliminary and (I think!) fairly short letter. I do not use a computer and I can no longer see my typing—so I hope my scribble is legible.
I enjoyed meeting you at the Institute[*35] last Friday, and today find your wonderful package, with The Emotional Lives of Animals which I will try to read over the weekend (but reading is much slower now that I have to use a magnifying glass), and your charming, illustrated books for younger readers (I have sometimes wondered about doing something similar with Chemistry—a children’s book of the Elements, with stories about their discovery and properties to make them seem exciting and almost [alive].
(Before I forget: do you know Alexandra Horowitz’ book Inside of a Dog? She was, very briefly, a student of mine.)
I am very glad you enclosed Jane’s[*36] marvellous article—so incisive, so passionate, so right. I am (ardently!) with her on every point save one—the existence of God. What is important is that I (or anyone else) can be with her on every point, even if agnostic or atheistic. Darwin, I suspect (with his own passionate sense of continuity and connectedness) would have been.
For some reason I myself have written more about plants than about animals—I enclose copies of Island and of Oaxaca Journal, plus a piece on Darwin and flowers. I have in mind a (companion) piece—or pieces—on what especially distinguishes animals and plants: Animal Minds and Memories (and, if you will, “Souls”). A starting point for me is (Darwin’s discussion of) the mental/emotional states of worms. I love Jane’s story of herself—as a baby, taking earthworms into her bed—I will (again) be bringing pots of soil crawling with earthworms into my kitchen (I did this in ’09 when I had an impulse to write about them). Darwin found that their “favorite” vegetables were onions, radishes and cabbage. These are my favorites too—which exemplifies the continuity of life!
So far I have written about insectivore plants (which Darwin calls “not only wonderful plants but sagacious animals”), sea-anemones, regular jellyfish, “box” jellyfish, sea-slugs (which Eric Kandel has studied so brilliantly) and cephalopods. […] Now I have to get onto vertebrates—if I’m up to it.
Again, all my thanks—and sorry for an overlong “brief” letter.
Oliver
To Gay Sacks and family
October 30, 2012
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Gay, Carla, Elliot and All,[*37]
I hope you have all received copies of Hallucinations from Picador. There was going to be a jolly publication party tonight, but that—like almost everything in NYC at the moment—is cancelled (hopefully just postponed).[*38]
Thank you for messages (which Kate tells me of)—it looks like the loss of power, and everything related to electrical power (such as running water), will last for several days. I have never seen (no one has) NYC brought to her knees in this way. None of us, I think, quite took “Sandy” seriously—tho’ I was fearful when I saw, on satellite pictures, that it was close to 1000 miles in diameter.
There have been a number of disasters or near-disasters—and no doubt there will be many to come. A frightening one was the failure of back-up power in NYU hospital—hundreds of patients, including people on respirators etc. and preemies in incubation, had to be taken elsewhere. I fear a substantial death-toll among them.
I can’t help thinking that our total dependence on “mains” electricity poses a huge potential danger like that of plant monocultures—potatoes, bananas, rubber, vines. William Cobbett[*39] worried about this more than 2 centuries ago, was worried about Big City Life, and felt every cottage should have its own source of power. We need vast back-up batteries as a start.
My book comes out next Tuesday, Election Day—I can’t help wondering how this business will affect both Election and book.
Again thanks for your messages, and all my love,
Oliver
* * *
—
Though he was by now in a relationship with Bill Hayes, OS resisted coming out publicly as a gay man (until the publication of his autobiography, in May 2015, only a few months before his death). So it had been especially important for him to hear, throughout his life, from other gay people living open lives. One such person was Bob Buscombe, a friend from OS’s San Francisco days.
To Bob Buscombe
May 14, 2013
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Bob,
What a sweet and happy letter—out of the blue. It brings you and Spaulding Avenue back, as if yesterday, and yet it was more than fifty years ago (1960–61, I think—I didn’t come to the States till the summer of ’60). It was a colorful time. But I think we have both been lucky enough to live and age well, and gratefully—and old age has its colors, colorfulness too (and what a nice, handsome, laughing picture of you). […]
I don’t think of my life as “dazzling,” but as an attempt to explore and understand things—human and otherwise. I have and have had many good friends, but never a “partner” (tho’ I have a feeling that things here are changing). I am moved that you have had a partner for 50 years—and are planting your garden together for the Spring (it has been a wonderful Spring in the East, and my favorite quince trees are in full blossom). (I enclose a couple of tiny fern pieces.) Otherwise, I am slightly blind, slightly deaf, slightly lame, and—like you—enjoy a swim daily. (I enclose too a little swim piece.) I will look you up if I find myself in LV, and you look me up if you are in NY.
Lovely to hear from you—
Affectionately,
Oliver
To Louis Breger
Psychotherapist
July 1, 2013
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Lou,
Thank you very much, first, for your very friendly and thoughtful letter of May 9. […]
It and you have been in my mind this past weekend, since after starting your book[*40] I have gone back to it—and read with great pleasure, and admiration, to the very end.
The fact that you show such sympathy and insight into the traumatized and neurotic Freud puts you in the right position to understand and criticize some of his later aberrations—and it made me read with an attention I can’t extend to the “Freud bashers.”
In my 47½ years with Shengold the “Oedipus complex” has rarely, if ever, been mentioned. But he has always brought things back to the (multiple) traumas of evacuation and school of my years between 6–10. Again, over-and-above (intellectual) insights, what has been crucial to me is the sense of his empathy and warmth and support and the feeling, the knowledge, that he likes me. We sit and face each other—no couch (I do not know how it is with his other patients). There is little talk of “resistance,” but much about “transference.” It must, as you bring out, have been similar with some of Freud’s patients, those who could bring out his best qualities as a human being and a therapist. It is odd, as you bring out, that he did not write (or hardly wrote) about his successful (and “happy”) cases but more about his failures (and, implicitly, the obstinate theoretical biases behind these). […]
With warm regards,
Oliver
To Björk[*41]
Musician
December 8, 2013
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Bjork,
I am so sorry—Billy and I will not be able to come to Iceland, to you, for the New Year’s Eve (we had booked hotels and everything)—but we will certainly come later in the year.
I got the DVD of you and David Attenborough (and even some of me)—I was tickled and pleased when you called me “the David Attenborough of the Brain.”
It has just started snowing in New York, and there is a crisp feeling of winter, and Christmas, in the air.
You must already have had lots of snow in Iceland—at least in the North.
We will be thinking of you on New Year’s Eve, and remembering the wonderful evening with you, you all, last New Year’s Eve—the great bonfire on the Beach, and everyone moving towards the Cathedral as midnight approached, and hugging and kissing and laughing and crying—the intensest expression of being alive.
Love from us both,
Oliver
PS: Hope you can read my writing!
To Gerald Edelman
December 17, 2013
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Gerry,
It is too long since we corresponded, but I often think of you, and hope that you are recovered after the difficult months earlier this year. I was very sorry I could not come in person to the special evening in July—but I was preoccupied with (80th) birthday visitors from England etc.
I have returned to writing about invertebrate nervous systems and behaviours—jellyfish, worms, Aplysia, insects and—my favorite cephalopods. By chance I met J. Z. Young in 1949—he was my examiner in a school exam, and one of the questions was about Octopus (I ignored the others); then again, in 1960, when he gave the lectures which were elaborated into A Model of the Brain;[*42] and now I am reading his (1995) article (in Cephalopod Neurobiology) on “Multiple matrices in the memory system of Octopus.”
Altho’ the nomenclature is different, he speaks in terms of populations, of learning, categorizing, in terms of (salience-based) “selection,” of “recurrent fibres,” and of what is in effect “degeneracy” i.e. of processes which sound akin to neural Darwinism. I was intrigued that he had been moved to this sort of “population” thinking by his studies of Octopus learning (and brains) and could not help wondering whether the two of you—your TNGS and further theories are much more fully supported, as well as intellectually elaborated—had any contact.
There are all sorts of difficulties—Theodore Bullock was a pioneer in contending with some of these, and I remember writing to him in the early 1950’s—and perhaps we will never be able to get the behavioural and physiological data we need with Octopus—but I am intrigued that your son David has been attracted to questions of cephalopod awareness, attention (I avoid saying “consciousness”) etc—and ways of investigating them and their neural correlates. I hope to visit him when his lab is set up in Bennington.
* * *
—
I hope I haven’t bent your ear too much with this letter, Gerry. I’d love to hear from you, and to visit you again.
My warmest good wishes,
Oliver
To Robert C. Stein
Correspondent
February 16, 2014
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear fellow-boy-chemist-and-octogenarian,
Thank you for your charming letter. I am especially glad that my Uncle Tungsten […] had resonances for a real chemist like you.
I have, however, an opposite, at least different, philosophy from “Get rid of all those books and papers.” While I am happy to give some books away—I am very glad that I have copies of so many of the letters received and written over the decades—for example, the many, and vivid, and deeply felt letters which passed between my parents and myself when I came to America in 1960. Where memories are often feeble and capricious, these have really allowed me to revisit (and write about) that part of my life—and to realize how insufficiently I appreciated the loving qualities of my parents at that special time. Having and reading and writing about these letters—more than 50 years later—seems to fill in and “complete” my sense of that time—and generally. This, for example, is part of the “completing” process, which would be impossible if I had got rid of the letters.
In a sense this is “putting one’s house in order”—and lots of old people feel (and can give to others) a special pleasure in recollecting, and writing of, their lives. This, for me, is part (tho’ only part) of “completing” it.
With best wishes (and don’t let any more letters be thrown away!)
Oliver Sacks
To Atul Gawande
Surgeon, Author of Being Mortal
June 26, 2014
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Atul (if I may),
I have only just returned (from Israel, where I went for the 100th birthday of a cousin, independent and practicing as a physician till her 99th year), but I have started reading Being Mortal—though (as Kate mentioned) reading is slow for me now (I am only up to Chapter 3).
But I want to say, right now, that I think your book is marvellous—extremely important and timely, as well as beautifully written. I would be more than happy, I would be honored, to express my appreciation of it.
Having worked (largely) with the frail and elderly (since 1966), and being elderly (and a little frail) now myself, I resonate to all you say. (I have, in fact, been writing an essay on “Frailty” myself, especially in relation to neural function.) I will write at more length, and provide a comment your publishers can use, when I have completed your book.
But I want to say “Congratulations!” right now.
With best wishes,
Oliver
PS: Forgive this messy letter—I am too jet-lagged to organize my thoughts too well at the moment.
To Antonio Damasio
November 7, 2014
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Antonio,
(Kate and) I really loved our visit to you and Hanna at USC, seeing how you fused Art and Science, and discovering how many interests (and perspectives) we shared—not least our admiration for Gerry,[*43] our puzzlement as to why his (amazing, deep) work did not have more impact on his contemporaries, and grief over the lamentable way in which he was treated in his last years.
I was thrilled by your (and Carvalho’s) paper on “The Nature of Feelings etc”—it seemed to open up a huge, obvious, but (bizarrely) neglected aspect of being alive, being sentient, being an animal: giving our (autonomic etc) plexuses, our small naked axons, and our ephaptic (surely no less important than synaptic) transmission their due. I have especially been reading of (what one has to call) affective behaviours—if not feelings—in invertebrates; and will be returning to the subject, with a more “Damasian” perspective, when I am through with my autobiography.
In quite a different realm, your work on the (so-varied) powers of music seemed to me very exciting—and to put what is sometimes seen as a questionable (or overhyped) subject on a solid basis.
Coming back to feelings—and ephapses, I could not help thinking of Henry Head’s (phenomenological and evolutionary) distinction of “protopathic” and “epicritic”—now “discredited” or “forgotten” or “superceded” but still, in my mind, very relevant to your thoughts on “feelings,” and their diffusive neural basis. Did you ever encounter or write about thalamic syndromes? […]
I think you are bringing a whole new clarity and sanity to the (evolutionary) doubleness of our neural mechanisms—and how “sentience” (and then awareness) originated.
Kate joins me in sending our warmest regards to you and Hanna, and hopes to see lots more of you—
Oliver
To David Brody
Correspondent
November 21, 2014
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear fellow-atheist and skeptic,
