Skip to main content

Uncle Tungsten




To read Oliver Sacks' 2001 recollection of his childhood years, his great appreciation for how the mind works was inspired by a relative, who he called Uncle Tungsten, that introduced him to the wonderful world of chemistry.  Sacks, who recently died at the age of 82, never lost his passion for the periodic table, collecting an element for each year of his life.  Thallium proved not so easy to acquire at age 81, and needed special housing.  He worried how he was going to deal with Bismuth, but Plumbum, better known as Lead, is the final element in his periodic table.

It would be easy to say that Dr. Sacks died with a heavy heart, but as he wrote in an essay several months back when he was told his condition was terminal, he accepted his condition, especially since he felt he had been given nine extra years after he was first diagnosed with an ocular melanoma.  It's only fitting since many of the patients he shared with us through his fabulous books similarly had to learn to cope with their conditions and had learned to accept them.

His recent books have focused more on himself, notably The Mind's Eye, which starts with his own condition.  It grows into a wonderful study on how to come to terms with his condition, ambling in different directions as he writes the book in the form of journal entries, which was a departure from his previously tightly knitted sets of case studies.  The book sprang from an essay he wrote in 2003, first published in the New Yorker.

One of my favorite books was The Island of the Colorblind, where he studied an indigenous group of natives on an island near Guam, who had become selectively colorblind over succeeding generations because it allowed them to thrive in a dense jungle setting where a "normal" sighted person only saw a sea of green.  By being completely colorblind, these natives were better able to differentiate the shades of gray and better live in this environment.  It was only a select few who had this condition, descendants of the king.  Others focused their energies more on the shoreline, where color differentiation was more important.

His most famous book, Awakenings, was made into a movie starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.  Sacks wrote of his experience working with Williams in this lovely obituary last year.  Sacks noted that at times he felt uneasy with the uncanny way Williams was able to capture his mannerisms, and it was literally like seeing himself.  Robin Williams' daughter returned the gesture with this wonderful photograph of the two of them together.

Sacks' interests were broad and this was readily apparent in his essays and books.  In Migraine, he talks of the necessity to study the history of a condition, taking migraines all the way back to Roman times.  He had a special fondness for William James, the pioneering American psychoanalyst.  Sacks wondered if migraines and epilepsy could have been at the root of some of the fantastic visions and great insights that occurred over time, noting famous writers and artists who suffered from migraines.  As a self-help guide to the condition, it may not be the best book, as he comes to no pat conclusions on migraines, but he takes the reader on an intellectual and emotional journey filled with many rich insights.

I think what drew Sacks to James is that William James saw many of the psychological conditions making themselves manifest in the industrial age as a byproduct of the society we lived in.  James saw schizophrenia more as a social condition with many variants, not a clinical psychological disease that had to be treated ruthlessly, even to the point of lobotomies.  While Sacks had greater resources to pinpoint the cause of some of these clinical conditions, he also saw the social components, notably in migraines that have yet to be pinpointed.

Although Sacks released his final autobiography On the Move this past spring, I don't imagine this will be his final word.  One can only imagine the files and journals Sacks kept over the years and that some of these stories will find their way into print in the coming years.   In his own imitable way, he has been our Uncle Tungsten, allowing us to share in his unique neurological understanding of the world thanks to his wonderfully accessible pen.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!