Letters, page 63
Journalist
June 30, 1997
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Jim,
Many thanks for your FAX—I remember, most gratefully, your fine profile of me.[*21] […]
I am not sure that I can begin to answer your question(s) properly, for I regard risk as an essential part of life—at least, of a life which seeks adventure, novelty, uncertainty, surprise, or at least permits these; and a life without these is no life at all. Again, risk has to accompany every wish, expectation, hope, desire; every promise, every trust; and, for that matter, every hypothesis, every theory; to say nothing of every relation(ship). I cannot imagine a life without risk(s). And if one regards life (following von Neumann)[*22] as a game—(or, following Pascal, as a wager)—then the defining idea is Risk.
Your first and third questions relate to (my) work. I am not especially at risk (I think) from infectious disease—tho’ I contracted chickenpox in 1968, just fourteen days after I had examined a patient with shingles. I have to have tuberculin tests now yearly—every health worker must. I work predominantly with an elderly population, in whom pneumonias, infected decubiti (bedsores) etc. are all too common—but my own immunity, immune system, seems fairly robust, and I do not seem any the worse for being with them. I have had almost no contact with patients with AIDS, altho’ I have often thought that I would like to work more closely with such patients.
There are other sorts of risk which are much more in my mind. For example, in 1967, when l-DOPA became available, both its promise, and its risk(s), for my post-encephalitic patients, seemed enormous to me. It might, I thought, “awaken” them—but awaken them to a world no longer their own. It might, I thought, act as a stimulant—but it might stimulate manias, tics, deliria, nightmares, uncontrols which had been present before they became parkinsonian, and which might re-erupt, if they were treated, once again. (I speak of these doubts in the 1990 edition of Awakenings.) I have constantly to ask whether a treatment may do harm—and harm may result from the best of intentions. In “To See and Not See” I ponder whether “the gift of sight” did not pose a major risk to the patient, who had been so well adapted, for half a century, to being blind.
There seems to me major risks in having power, or assuming responsibility, both of which are inseparable from the life of a physician. I try, now, not to promise, even implicitly promise, anything—other than listening and attention and honesty. I say to every patient “I don’t know if I can help, but I will try to understand and to discuss every issue carefully with you.” There is risk in the (inevitable) idealization(s) which accompany all doctor-patient relationships: I will try to bring these to consciousness, to discuss these—as “transference neuroses”—with some patients; and to work these through, quietly, with others.
My larger projects, my books, I regard as major investments, adventures, and (so) risks. One puts all one has—one’s heart, one’s reputation, one’s whole life—into these, without any certainty as to how they will “come out,” or be received. There is always great anxiety about separation, letting go—letting this intimate piece of oneself into the world. I regard the first six months (or so—sometimes it is much longer) after the publication of a book as a time of real risk—one is dangerously vulnerable, annihilable by bad reviews. But somehow, thank God, one gets through this—perhaps because of some still-deeper confidence or security, at a level deeper than the obvious vulnerability. That is, if one truly feels one has done one’s best, and that it is a good piece of work.
You asked for a couple of sentences, and this is becoming a confession!
I think I might be perceived, in some ways, as a risk-taking person (why else should I be covered with scars?)—traipsing alone up a mountain (A Leg to Stand On), flying in a small plane with a Touretter (Anthropologist), and all sorts of things—such as you mention—in Island. Some of the risks might be seen as reckless, some as courageous, most as part of the job-in-hand. I did not regard sakau[*23] as a risk, it is not considered risky—whereas (many years ago) I did risk my life with drugs. With swimming (and, since Island, scuba-ing) on reefs, including night-dives, and dives below a hundred feet, the idea of risk (if I take reasonable care, and have a responsible “buddy”) is not in my mind. I am not fearful, in general, of other forms of life—if I let them alone, I feel, they will do the same for me. I have a certain fatalism when things are out of my hands (e.g. plane rides, being struck by lightning etc.). On the other hand, the daily commute to the office from my home in the Bronx, on bad roads, in bad weather, with millions of frequently incompetent drivers, seems to me increasingly unacceptable as a risk, and one which I am now bringing to an end.
I must also bring this overlong (and perhaps risky!) letter to an end—please feel free to ignore it, and write in your own way!
My best—
Oliver
To Jonathan Cole
September 20, 1997
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Jonathan,
Thank you so much for your fine, warm letter—(I think) I have been a little depressed lately (for unclear reason or reasons), and it did me good to read it. […]
For myself, I have found it a bit hard to settle back to New York and neurology after the Amazon[*24]—and am still there, in a sense, vicariously, through reading. I am pondering Ageing, somewhere, in the back of my mind—and, as a start, have begun to make house-calls, to visit the aged and infirm populations around Beth Abraham, with the visiting nurse.[*25] A single half-day of this, in which I saw so much: not just illness, but poverty, loneliness, community, courage etc.—what real life can be like in the Bronx—has made me think how much Medicine itself misses, is impoverished, by not making house-calls, and just seeing patients in hospitals or offices. Of course this is not the case in England (and Canada and Australia)—but house-calls have been extinct in the States, virtually, for 50 years or more. (I was, in part, incited to start on home visits by reading a fascinating paper published in Scotland in the 1950’s, “Confusion in the Home.”)
But also (and in part because I don’t want publishers, agents etc. breathing down my neck, and saying “How’s the Ageing book coming? What have you to show us” etc.; I want to pursue the research quietly, privately, in my own way) I am wondering about collecting various pieces published here and there over the years, and turning these into a book. There are several categories—biographic essays (as of Humphry Davy & Freud), neurological pieces, and personal memoirs of one sort and another (“Water Babies” etc.), and I am not sure whether to mix these or keep them separate.
At the moment, I am revising—rather, reconceiving rather radically—an (unpublished) essay on Music & the Brain[*26] I wrote about three years ago. It is a subject which takes one in the most unexpected directions.
Again, thanks—and my love & best wishes to you all,
Oliver
To Alison Samuel
Editor
October 23, 1997
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Ms. Samuel,
Thank you for the proof of Elizabeth Mapstone’s book.[*27]
It is clearly well-researched, and -organized, and -written, but I am the wrong person to comment on it, because I never felt there was any significant difference between men and women in Science, the Arts, Argument, or anything else; so I find the book—and all similar books—incomprehensible (I am prepared to believe that this is a strange gender-agnosia, or gender-denial, on my part; indeed I think the word “gender” should be confined to grammar!).
Can I suggest that you send the proof (if you have not already done so) to my colleague and friend Deborah Tannen?
Yours sincerely,
Oliver Sacks
To Freeman Dyson
Physicist, Author
November 30, 1997
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Freeman,
[…] For the last two or three weeks I have been thinking and writing about the passion I had for Science—in particular Chemistry, and most especially the Periodic Table—between the ages of 10 and 13. I was doing Classics then at school—competently but indifferently, but spent every minute I could in the Science Museum and Library, and doing experiments in a little lab of my own. I had some encouragement from a favourite uncle (he manufactured “Tungstalite” light-bulbs, and I would go to his little factory in Holborn and see the heavy tungsten powder compressed and sintered and drawn into wire)—I called him “Uncle Tungsten”—but most of the passion was autonomous and so exothermic that it needed no stimulation beyond books and museums, (and, later, a couple of friends who shared it).
But it was not just excitement—it was peace, it was security, it was friendliness, it was a haven. I thought of the Periodic Table as a sort of magical map, or world, or garden, with qualities of the magic garden (in “The Door in the Wall”) Wells writes of, and “the landscape of his dreams…the fauna and flora of his own secret planet” G. K. Chesterton speaks of—and was sure, from the start, that it was a deep representation of reality, and not simply a useful device. When I was 13, I got my school certificate, and moved over to the Science side at school. And with this (tho’ there were doubtless other factors at work) my passion for Chemistry, it seems to me, promptly ended, was “killed.” Perhaps I should have stayed with Classics, as the High Master suggested?
Forgive this gratuitous reminiscence—but picking up your grand essay “To Teach or Not to Teach” today I was intensely glad and grateful you had written it, not least because it allowed me to feel that my own (seemingly paradoxical) experience was neither unique nor perverse. I don’t think I was able to recapture the delight and playfulness and passion of those early days until I finally got out of school—which for a physician, a neurologist, can last 20 years.
This mood of reminiscence was prompted, in part, by a chemist-friend, Roald Hoffmann, sending me a little bar of tungsten (like the bars of W my uncle gave me) […] and re-opening what used to be my favourite book (combining, as it did, the intellectual excitement, the fun, of Chemistry and the Periodic Table, a morning freshness and an infinity of footnotes in all directions)—Mendeleev’s Principles. […]
I hope I can visit (all of) you soon.
My best,
Oliver
To Peter Swales
Freud Scholar
December 30, 1997
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Peter,
How very nice to hear from you again (and at this season which evokes memories of a goose and a Christmas-pudding we shared in Mott St. one year).
I enjoyed “Freud, Filthy Lucre, & Undue Influence” (as I enjoy all your writings)—for its wit and its vivacity (which are always captivating!), but, no less, for its detailed documentation and synthesis argument (I was going to write “synthesis,” as you see, and you mustn’t take “argument” amiss: after all, Darwin wrote that Origin was essentially one sustained argument from beginning to end).
Many years ago (indeed the last time I met him, in Feb ’73, was when I was in a passionate Leibniz-phase) I said to Auden that I could hardly believe what I had read about Leibniz’ “meanness.” Surely such a man, such a philosopher, I said, must be “above” all material concerns and pettiness, of an immense generosity in every way, etc. Wystan smiled at my naivete, and said that he, as a start, would have no more difficulty believing Leibniz to be a skinflint than Newton a murderer (which he was, in effect, when Master of the Mint). I don’t quite know why I make this tangent—I guess it is to say that whilst I am prepared to believe the worst about the Master’s money-hunger, exploitations, influencing unduly, sexual peccadilloes etc (and, of course, “liberties” in some of his case-histories)—yet this does not make him less interesting to me. (Nor more interesting.) Whereas I am deeply, radically, disquieted (say) by Heidegger’s pro-Nazi attitudes etc, and feel these do often infiltrate/contaminate his thought—so that this cannot be dissociated from what one knows about him. Deep waters.
Though (as you know) I have myself been in analysis (or whatever) for more than 30 years—it will be thirty-two this January—I rarely think about Freud, and see him neither as a “hero” or a “villain”—though certainly as remarkable and important. How remarkable, how important, it is impossible to say; nor to make ready comparisons—how does one compare apples and oranges and plums and pears?
Perhaps now, additionally, I shy away from the subject—I had a feeling that I was retreating into palaeobotany in the last year or two (tho’ if you get to read it, you may be amused by my little biographic footnote on Marie Stopes,[*28] whose movement from cycad sexuality to human sexuality proceeded, poetically, through her thwarted love for a Japanese botanist—the one to describe, for the first time, the motile spermatozoids of gymnosperms)—and now I am (perhaps) beating a further retreat, away from the organic altogether, to my first love (inorganic chemistry), which I had a grand passion for in the years just before adolescence—so my next writing (book, piece, whatever) will be an attempt to remember/reconstruct the life, feelings, explorations of an odd, perhaps gifted chemistry-mad boy of eleven, in the last years of the War, in London.
Given this interest at the moment I could not help noticing the (envious) reference to Auer von Welsbach in Freud’s “top-hat” dream.[*29] Von W was a great and dedicated chemist of the rare-earth elements—the separator of Mosander’s “didymium” into two separate elements, and the discoverer, in effect, of element 71, which he named “Cassiopeium” […] (tho’ the credit of this was taken from him by slick Urbain, a French chemist, who buttered up the Parisian Academy of Sciences by calling it “lutetium”).[*30] But v. W was also (without ceasing to be a very important chemist) an entrepreneur passionate for fame and fortune (which he was to win with his gas-mantles). The at-first civilized dispute between him and Urbain[*31] became exceedingly ugly (and somewhat partisan and nationalistic—the French touting “their” chemist, and element; the Austrians “theirs”), and lost both of them a Nobel prize. Both behaved very “ignobly” (in a moral and personal sense) at least in their later squabbles, but both were great chemists who deserved Nobels. Perhaps I am again (tho’ this was not in my mind at the beginning of the paragraph) searching for some sort of “extenuation” here, as with Freud—that if someone behaves ignobly or even monstrously at times it has no necessary bearing on their work (etc.).
Thank you so much for the charming postcard of the Vienna Palm House and your friendly message. I spent more time in the Schönbrunn Palmenhaus than in Freud’s house, and it (along with other botanical gardens in Austria and Germany) inspired a footnote—one of twenty new footnotes—which will appear in the paperback of Island next month (I enclose a copy).
All my best wishes to you, Peter, for 1998!
Oliver
To Richard Gregory
July 20, 1998
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Richard,
I was delighted (as always, but especially now) to get your letter—tho’ very sorry you could not join us on the boat on Saturday.[*32]
Whatever internal feelings or knowledge one may have of oneself, there is another sense of one’s self, and one’s life, which can only come from one’s friends (students, colleagues, family, etc)—you have to see them, perhaps have them (or as many as you can) all gathered together at a celebration or party, you have to see them all together to know who you are. There were, I don’t know, a hundred, nearly 200, people on the boat, who would have seemed, to a passer-by, another boat, bizarrely unrelated, heterogenous. What, who, could have possibly brought this unintelligible collection together? And it is you—yourself. You brought them together: their radii intersect in you, and yours in them. I am putting it badly—but it is a sweet and extraordinary experience; and I know you too had it at that grand and lovely party you had in the Exploratorium for your 70th.
A 65th I have a clear memory of is Auden’s.[*33] I was 38 then, and thought Gosh, how grand, how old, what could 65 be like? And now I’m there, here, I don’t feel grand, or old, tho’ (I like to think) some sort of “integration” has occurred. I see this in many of my contemporaries and friends—in Jonathan[*34] (who will have his 65th next July), in whom so many seemingly autonomous or divergent (even conflicting) streams of mind seem now to have coalesced into a single broad river; tho’ he, we, will continue to move in unexpected directions, to leap, to surprise even ourselves, to our dying day. […]
God knows whether any of our “Works” will last—I am much more confident of yours than mine.
You sound chock-a-block full of your habitual, marvellous, inextinguishable vitality—so many, many, many happy returns to you for yr 75th on the 24th.
All my best wishes, and love,
Oliver
PS Sorry for scrawl!
To Rachel Herz
Olfactory Researcher
January 9, 1999
2 Horatio St., New York
Dear Dr. Herz,
Thank you so much for your letter (of November 6) and the varied and fascinating reprints you enclosed—I have been away much of these last two months, and am sorry to be so slow in acknowledging these.
I am not sure that I can tell you too much more about the medical student I wrote about in Hat,[*35] but (it seems to me) I may have observed similar “hyperosmias” in certain categories of patient, namely those with Tourette’s syndrome, with post-encephalitic syndromes, and with Asperger’s syndrome or early infantile autism. I have never written at any length about these, though have made occasional short references to them (as in the enclosed xerox pages from Anthropologist). Whether one is seeing a genuine “hyperosmia,” or whether it is (just) a heightened attention to smell, I am not sure. It tends to go (in all of the above) with striking sniffing behaviours—a sniffing and snuffling almost as conspicuous as looking and listening, in the rest of us. One must wonder (in a very different way!) about the heightened, or educated, olfactory sensibilities of those who work professionally with perfumes, wines etc (do you know Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume?).
