“To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment,” ran the epigraph to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks’s fourth book and his first best seller—the one that made him famous, in 1985, as a Scheherazade of brain disorder. A sensitive bedside-manner neurologist, he had previously written three books, none of which had attracted much notice at all. The Man Who Mistook would mark the beginning of another career, and a much more public one, as perhaps the unlikeliest ambassador for brain science—a melancholic, savantlike physician disinterested in grand theories and transfixed by those neurological curiosities they failed to explain. Sacks was 52 years old and cripplingly withdrawn, a British alien living a lonely aquatic life on City Island, and for about ten years had been dealing with something like what he’d later call “the Lewis Thomas crisis,” after the physician and biologist who decided, in his fifties, to devote himself to writing essays and poetry.” • #схватил_за_мозг - × × ×

Мимими! — “I once heard a radio program about people who’d been evacuated in the war as children, as I was,” Sacks says. “And one of the men there, who’d had rather a bad time, now seemed to be fine, but said he felt he was deficient in the three B’s: belief, belonging, and bonding. And I would say that a bit for myself. I’m a friendly guy, but there’s always a certain, almost uncrossable distance.” Later, a little sadly, he goes further. “I never initiate contact. It’s a little bit like some of my Parkinsonian patients, who can’t initiate movement but can respond to music or a thrown ball.” - × × ×

He describes himself as a graphomaniac (having published now a dozen books, with just as many unpublished or discarded) and a babbler (“Things gush out of me, for better or for worse, incontinently”). But the feeling you get in his audience is of fastidious control, a man keeping the world at a safe distance—as though the wilted-flower persona is a genuine but therapeutic performance, benefiting his patients, his readers, and Sacks himself. “I’m sorry I’ve been a little evasive,” Sacks tells me at one point, offering one of many apologies for running off track. “But, what the hell, one has to be.” - × × ×

Таки две референтки — “One is Hailey Wojcik, a young woman with a dyed-pink streak in her hair who helps manage Sacks’s curiously active website (“As some of you asked after our last newsletter, how come the famously computer-illiterate Dr. Sacks has all this social media???”), and the other is Kate Edgar, a longtime collaborator who began as a sort of assistant and is now something like a best friend, first reader and editor, and stage manager.” - × × ×

Nothing short of awesome: “In 1962, he took a residency at UCLA, where he became a regular at Muscle Beach and set a California state weightlifting record with a 600-pound power lift: “I was known as Dr. Squat,” he says, “which rather pleased me.” And he continued to motorbike, riding solo and loaded with amphetamines as far as the Grand Canyon, stopping only for gas. One day, a patient paralyzed from the neck down and blind from neuromyelitis optica heard Sacks was a biker, and asked to come along for a ride; with the help of weightlifting friends, he abducted her from the hospital, strapped her against his own torso, and rode up and down Topanga Canyon.” - × × ×

“The result was an elaborate and idiosyncratic case-history archive, a folklore of mental disorder as rich and varied as Freud’s, but de-Freuded—wiped dry of any mention of sex and the implication that patients may be in some way responsible for their suffering. In fact, they seem often not to be suffering at all, but, with Sacks—like Sacks—marveling at their own disorders. “I am sometimes moved to wonder whether it may not be necessary to redefine the very concepts of ‘health’ and ‘disease,’ ” he wrote in An Anthropologist on Mars. “While one may be horrified by the ravages of developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative too.” • #нет_никакой_нормы - × × ×