BOOKS

Review: Oliver Sacks Looks at His Life in ‘On the Move’

APRIL 27, 2015

Books of The Times

In a blunt, eloquent and devastating Op-Ed essay in The New York Times in February, Dr. Oliver Sacks revealed that cancer in his liver had left him with only months to live. This knowledge, he wrote, had enabled him to see his own life “as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.” He was grateful to “have loved and been loved,” and grateful, too, for “the special intercourse” with the world that writers and readers are privileged to know.

“Above all,” he added, “I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

That love of the world and Dr. Sacks’s wisdom about human beings — and the mysterious connections between the brain, the mind and the imagination — have animated his writing over the years, from “Migraine,” published four and a half decades ago, through “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” and more recent works like “Uncle Tungsten,” “Hallucinations” and “On the Move,” his deeply moving new memoir.

A professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and a longtime practicing physician, Dr. Sacks writes not only with a doctor’s understanding of medicine and science but also with a Chekhovian sympathy for his patients and a metaphysical appreciation of their emotional quandaries. His case studies have given us a palpable understanding of what it can be like to have conditions like Tourette’s syndrome, temporal lobe epilepsy, color blindness or memory loss, and some of them have the strangeness and resonance of tales by Borges or Calvino.

Dr. Sacks is as interested in the effect that his patients’ neurological disorders have on their inner lives and day-to-day routines as he is in the physiological manifestations of their conditions. And his writings about their struggles are testaments to human resilience, to the ability of people to adapt to their afflictions, even find in them a spur to creativity and achievement.

In “On the Move,” Dr. Sacks trains his descriptive and analytic powers on his own life, providing a revealing look at his childhood and coming of age, his discovery and embrace of his vocation, and his development as a writer. He gives us touching portraits, brimming with life and affection, of friends and family members (relatives that include, remarkably enough, the Li’l Abner cartoonist Al Capp and the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban). He recounts conversations about writing with the poet Thom Gunn — “the rushes and stoppages, the illuminations and darknesses.” And he describes W. H. Auden leaving America after 33 years to return home to England, looking “terribly old and frail, but nobly formal as a Gothic cathedral.”

This is a more intimate book than Dr. Sacks’s earlier ventures into autobiographical territory, like “Uncle Tungsten,” and the more he tells us about himself, the more we come to see how rooted his own gifts as an artist and a doctor are in his early family experiences in England and what he once thought of as emotional liabilities.

During World War II, as a young boy, he was sent away from London to “a hideous boarding school” where he was bullied and beaten, and while he adjusted to this separation from his family, he continued through much of his life, he says, to have trouble, in another evacuee’s words, “with the three B’s: bonding, belonging and believing” — difficulties that would help him empathize with patients, who often felt like misfits and outsiders.

His brother Michael was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and his psychotic episodes terrified young Oliver; he recalls feeling both shame over not spending more time with Michael and a need to get away from him, which led in part to his move to the United States in the 1960s. Science — with its promise of order and logic — provided a refuge from the chaos represented by Michael’s illness, and medicine was both a fulfillment of familial destiny (his mother and father, and two eldest brothers were all doctors) and a way “to explore schizophrenia and allied brain-mind disorders in my own patients and in my own way.”

Shy and inclined to living “at a certain distance from life,” Dr. Sacks writes that he unexpectedly fell in love — “(for God’s sake!) I was in my 77th year” — with an American named Billy, which meant relinquishing “the habits of a lifetime’s solitude,” like decades of meals that consisted mostly of cereal or sardines, eaten “out of the tin, standing up, in 30 seconds.”

If shyness and a difficulty in recognizing faces (a condition known as prosopagnosia, which he discussed at length in a 2010 essay in The New Yorker) could be socially inhibiting when Dr. Sacks was younger, he realized that if he found someone who shared his (usually scientific) interests — like volcanoes, jellyfish or gravitational waves — he would be drawn into animated conversation. And his curiosity and enthusiasm for a wide array of passions (including photography, swimming, weight lifting and motorcycle riding, and for a period, taking amphetamines) consumed the little free time he had when he was working 18-hour days seeing patients and doing research.

And writing. Always writing. He began keeping journals when he was 14, and says that at last count he had nearly a thousand in addition to voluminous correspondence and over a thousand clinical notes a year on patients, kept over many decades.

Writing takes him to another place, Dr. Sacks says, “where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time.”

“In those rare, heavenly states of mind,” he goes on, “I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come, and that I have been writing all day.”

That writing, which Dr. Sacks says gives him a pleasure “unlike any other,” has also been a gift to his readers — of erudition, sympathy and an abiding understanding of the joys, trials and consolations of the human condition.