{"id":10036,"date":"2025-02-11T14:36:26","date_gmt":"2025-02-11T18:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/oliver-sacks-in-love-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-02-11T14:36:26","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T18:36:26","slug":"oliver-sacks-in-love-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/oliver-sacks-in-love-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Oliver Sacks in Love \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOnly art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides \u2014 the seeming realities of this world,\u201d Saul Bellow insisted in his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech<\/a>. \u201cThere is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can\u2019t receive.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a beautiful sentiment, beautiful and incomplete. Art is but one way of contacting that deeper reality. Science is another, with its revelations of truths so beyond sight that they seem inconceivable, from the billions of neutrinos<\/a> passing through your body this very second to the hummingbird\u2019s flight<\/a> to the quantum bewilderment of the subatomic world.<\/p>\n

But more than art, more than science, we have invented one implement to cut through the curtain of habit and render the world new. Love alone blues the sky and greens the grass and brightens all the light we see. It is the last irreducible reality, whose mystery no painting or poem can fully capture and no fMRI can fully explain. <\/p>\n

In 1965, the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks<\/a> (July 9, 1933\u2013August 30, 2015) moved from Los Angeles, where he had just finished a graduate program at UCLA, to New York, where he was offered a post at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He found the city a place of \u201cfantastic creative furor,\u201d but his painful introversion and sense of difference left him feeling friendless.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Oliver Sacks as a UCLA graduate student, 1964. (Courtesy of Oliver Sacks Foundation.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That summer, just before beginning his new job, he traveled home to London. While in Europe, he met Jen\u00f6 Vincze \u2014 a charismatic Hungarian theater director living in Berlin. Oliver had been planning to go to a neurology conference in Vienna. Instead, he found himself in Paris, in Amsterdam, in love with Jen\u00f6. Here was a rigorous and original scientist, who would devote his life to illuminating the neurological underpinnings of our strangest mental states, suddenly subsumed in the strangest and most mysterious of them all. He would later look back on this time as one of \u201can intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

When he reluctantly returned to New York, Oliver set about trying to bridge the abyss of physical absence by rendering his world alive in words, composing some of the greatest love letters<\/a> I have read. In one of the treasures collected in his posthumously published Letters<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), he writes:<\/p>\n

\n

My dearest Jen\u00f6: <\/p>\n

I have clutched your letter in my pocket all day, and now I have time to write to you. It is seven o\u2019clock, the ending of a perfect day. The sun is mauve and crimson on the New York skyline. Reflected from the cubes and prisms of an Aztec city. Black clouds, like wolves, are racing through the sky. A jet is climbing on a long white tail. Howling wind. I love its howling, I want to howl for joy myself. The trees are thrashing to and fro. An old man runs after his hat. Darker now. The sun has set, City. A black diagram on the sombre skyline. And soon there\u2019ll be a billion lights.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He isn\u2019t, of course, describing the city as it is but as he is. This, in the end, may be what love is \u2014 the billion lights inside that make the whole world luminous, an inner sun to render every dull surface and every dark space radiant:<\/p>\n

\n

I don\u2019t feel the distance either, only the nearness. We\u2019re together all the while. I feel your breath on the side of my neck\u2026 My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness. I smile like a lighthouse in all directions. Everyone catches and reflects my smile.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I want to share my joys with you. To see the green crab scuttling for the shadow, translucent egg cases hung from seaweed. A little octopus, just hatched, jetting for joy in the salty water. Sea anemones. The soft sweet pressure if you touch their center. The chalky hands of barnacles. And polychaetes in their splendid liveries (they remind me of Versailles), moving with insensate grace. And dive with me under the ocean, Jen\u00f6. Through fish, like birds, which accept your presence. And scarlet sponges in a hidden cave. And the freedom, the complete and utter freedom of motion, second only to that of space itself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting the Audubon Society.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Oliver yearned to transport Jen\u00f6 not only to the world he walked through but to the world within, the world he would always best access and best channel in writing. \u201cThe act of writing,\u201d he would reflect a lifetime later<\/a>, \u201cis a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.\u201d Now, he tells his beloved:<\/p>\n

\n

I read Psalms in profanity, for the joy they contain, and the trust and the love, and the pure morning language\u2026 I write so much. I want to catch everything and share it with you. You will be deprived of all your social life, your sleep, your food, condemned to read interminable letters. Poor Jen\u00f6, committed to a lover who\u2019s never silent, who talks all day, and talks all night, and talks in company, and talks to himself. Words are the medium into which I must translate reality. I live in words, in images, metaphors, syllables, rhymes. I can\u2019t help it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Again and again, he keeps returning to this new quality of light suddenly revealed by love:<\/p>\n

\n

The weather has been of supernal beauty. The day steeps everything in golden liquid\u2026 A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love\u2026 I never saw that golden light before we met in Paris.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps it was this brush with the irreducible immensity of love that would later lead Oliver to write so presciently about the limits of artificial intelligence<\/a> and so poignantly about the meaning of our human lives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Two days later, he writes again:<\/p>\n

\n

I love you insanely, yet it is the sweetest sanity I have ever known. I read and reread your wonderful letter. I feel it in my pocket through ten layers of clothing. Its trust, its warmth, exceed anything I have ever known\u2026 I believe we are both infinite, Jen\u00f6. I see the future as an endless expansion of the present, not the remorseless tearing-off of calendar leaves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Like all people in love, Oliver was envisioning a life with Jen\u00f6, not once imagining that they would never see each other again, that he would spend the next thirty-five years celibate and afraid of love, afraid of himself in love. <\/p>\n

But love would find him in the end \u2014 a beautiful and bright love<\/a> that would hold him through dying with dignity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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