In addition to others featured here, Oliver Sacks is one of my favorite authors. For most of his life he was known as a respected neurologist and passionate storyteller who took a wholistic view of his patients, not seeing them as diseases that need to be titrated away, but instead as complex individuals. Although Sacks basically reinvented the medical case study in his early books, his later works largely contain thoughtful essays on his many interests outside of neurology including the physical sciences, botany, photography, stereography, and more. When I think of the type of writer I want to be Oliver Sacks comes to mind.

One of Sacks’s most striking works is Gratitude, a collection of four essays that were written in the final years of his life just before and then after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The essays are largely a meditation on his own life, an offer of thanks at times, and a reflection of what it means to die well.

There are two lines from these essays that strike me. First, while talking about one of his favorite philosophers, David Hume, Sacks comments:

“Hume continued: ‘I am… a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.’ Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships, and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild disposition. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.”

The second quote refers to Sack’s recovery from a near suicidal addiction to amphetamines:

“Recovery started slowly, as I found meaningful work in New York, in a chronic care hospital… I was fascinated by my patients there, 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, and this I pursued doggedly, single-mindedly, with little encouragement from my colleagues. Almost unconsciously, I became a storyteller at a time when medical narrative was almost extinct. This did not dissuade me, for I felt my roots lay in the great neurological case studies of the nineteenth century… It was a lovely but deeply satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.”

Sacks enthusiasm for life is exemplified in the first quote his penchant for deep though and learning in the second. I find the allusion to a “monkish existence” to be particularly striking. The line reminds me that it is okay to spend time in the proverbial desert, learning, absorbing, contemplating and not being overly concerned about where to go next.