“Here I am, look what I can do,” is how he describes his feelings about his first professional intervention into the American neurological community.
Going far career-wise was something Sacks fervently desired.
Sacks developed a genius for paying attention to people whose illness might have rendered them invisible. Oliver was the youngest Sacks, and he would make his career, and his “good name,” in the United States. Perhaps more importantly, his brother Michael was schizophrenic, and the suffering that filled the family home was more than Oliver could bear. Both his parents and two of his brothers were doctors, and he needed space-plenty of space. Having completed his studies in medicine, he left his native England for North America. Even in renunciation, he went very far indeed.Īnd Sacks settled far from home. But after a “joyous” 40th “birthday fling” with a younger man, he has no sex for the next 35 years. “In the absence of internal controls,” he tells us in his memoir, “I have to have external ones.” As a gay man growing up in post-war England, sex was dangerous, and so in this domain Sacks displayed prudence (except when he didn’t, as when visiting Amsterdam). Recreational swimming would last for several hours in choppy waters, motorcycle rides would cross a continent, working out would result in his setting a California state record in weight lifting.
The child pushed the limits of his chemistry set until the house filled with smoke, the young man filled himself with drugs at first for pleasure and experimentation-and then because of addiction.
When the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks was a schoolboy, a teacher noted on his report card: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It was a perceptive comment, for as it turned out, “going too far” was something Sacks would do throughout his life.
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