Oliver Sacks, On The Move
Damn, what a life! This book is a kind of a mess structurally and loses a little steam at the end, but it’s incredibly readable, and just a tad smutty at times, which is pretty delightful.
The penultimate spread of the book — pages 382-383 — is my favorite, where Sacks talks about finding love at the end of his life, and his great love, writing. (“The only things I really enjoy are talking… reading and writing.”)
I always keep a notebook by my bedside, for dreams as well as nighttime thoughts, and I try to have one by the swimming pool or the lakeside or the seashore; swimming too is very productive of thoughts which I must write…
Sacks had a “need to think on paper,” and he might’ve agreed with the famous Field Notes saying, “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now”:
I rarely look at the journals I have kept for the greater part of a lifetime. The act of writing itself is enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing… My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special indispensable form of talking to myself.
He said that sometimes when he was swimming he would get relaxed and sometimes whole paragraphs would come into his head, and he would swim to shore and drip all over the legal pad he kept on the table by the lake.
He would also go to concerts and write. When somebody saw him at the hall and asked him about it:
I quoted Nietzsche, who used to write at concerts, too; he loved Bizet and once wrote, “Bizet makes me a better philosopher.” I said I felt that Mozart made me a better neurologist…
He was also a quotation collector:
I often transcribe quotations I like, writing or typing them on pieces of brightly colored paper and pinning them to a bulletin board. When I lived in City Island, my office was full of quotations, bound together with binder rings that I would hang to the curtain rods about my desk.
When he couldn’t write, he wrote letters, and kept a copy of all the letters he received, as well as the copies of his own. When he was in great pain, writing helped: “[t]he concentration involved in writing, I found, was almost as good as the morphine and had no side effects.” Earlier in his life, he would late into the night, what he called “nightcaps.”
Like all great writers, of course, he was a great reader. When he won a 50 pound prize in college, he bought twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary with it. He eventually read the whole dictionary in medical school, and sometimes read volumes of the dictionary in bed.
When his mother died, he said, “I found it impossible to read anything mundane; I could only read the Bible or Donne’s Devotions when I finally went to bed each night.”
I loved this paragraph he wrote in a letter to his parents:
As for the other intangible and incalculable things you have given me, I can only repay these by leading a fairly happy and useful life, keeping in touch with you, and seeing you when I can.
And decided to paraphrase it and save it for my sons:
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