The wisdom of Oliver Sacks

Dr. Oliver Sacks, celebrated writer and neurologist, passed away from cancer at the age of 82 yesterday. Sacks was known for his empathy in writing and in practice, as well as the accessible way he wrote case studies from his medical work, like the popular “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.”

His writing helped to educate the public about neurological problems. As The New York Times wrote about his life, “Describing his patients’ struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourette’s or Asperger’s to a general audience. But he illuminated their characters as much as their conditions; he humanized and demystified them.”

In February, Sacks wrote a beautifully moving essay in The New York Times, where he talked about his terminal diagnosis and what he wanted to do with the precious few months he had left. He was afraid, he acknowledged, but he was also grateful: “I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world.”

In honor of his life, we’ve selected some of the best pieces of wisdom he had about life, death, and the incredible moments in between.

 “I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).”

”My Own Life”, The New York Times

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears—it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more—it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”

Musicophilia (2007)

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story—his real, inmost story?’—for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives—we are each of us unique.”

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) 

“I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.

”The Joy of Old Age (No Kidding.)”, The New York Times

“I love to discover potential in people who aren’t thought to have any.”

—Interview with People. March 17, 1986

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.”

—Hallucinations (2012) 

“When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

”My Own Life”, The New York Times

Rest in peace, Dr. Sacks. The world will miss you.

[Image via Luigi Novi at Wikimedia commons]