… has died.
He did interesting things.
In 1974, Dr. Sacks tore his left quadriceps while running from a bull on a Norwegian mountaintop...
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Like James Merrill, who notes in his great poem Santorini: Stopping the Leak that as an artist he has always suffered from “psychic incontinence” – an uncontrollable tendency to imagine the experience of others, to lose himself and get inside them sympathetically and try to give language to their experience – Sacks says he was
fascinated by my patients ….[I] cared for them deeply, and felt something of a mission to tell their stories — stories of situations virtually unknown, almost unimaginable, to the general public and, indeed, to many of my colleagues. I had discovered my vocation …
He also put it like this:
“I would like it to be thought that I had listened carefully to what patients and others have told me … that I’ve tried to imagine what it was like for them, and that I tried to convey this.”
It’s what Iris Murdoch describes as the artist’s capacity/compulsion to “see the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and … not picture the world in his own image.” The larger Murdoch quotation makes clear that this impulse is as moral as it is aesthetic:
[M]ost great writers have a sort of calm merciful vision because they can see how different people are and why they are different. Tolerance is connected with being able to imagine centers of reality which are remote from oneself. The great artist sees the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and does not picture the world in his own image. I think this kind of merciful objectivity is virtue…
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Like Christopher Hitchens, who wrote up to the last moments of his life, a friend of Sacks said of him toward the end, ” We are pretty sure he will go with fountain pen in hand.”
August 30th, 2015 at 2:37PM
There’s a charming video of Dr. Sacks talking about his desk rig at “Science Friday”. The same video is linked at Fountain Pen Network.
August 30th, 2015 at 2:44PM
Thanks, Jack/OH.