But Lawrence Weschler has often come, his books have always had Something Interesting going on and i say this in a singular way he writes in about and has written about unique people or sometimes there are extraordinary situations as well but often these books are unique and unusual and this is a time when often it feels like it makes us all same exactly like something informed and conventional. The last time he was here in seattle was a couple of years ago with a man quite wellknown in the world of film walter murch and he had kept in touch and all these work he is done as a film editor. He is one of the foremost to his one in oscar and also an astrophysicist by heart with rogue theories and a book called waves passing in the night a book by Renan Walters with the dialogue of what he was doing. He does it in serious ways in various times. Tonight he is here for a book in this case someone we really have heard of that being delayed dr. Oliver sacks and this book chronicles the 30year friendship called and how are you dr. Sacks . But its a marvelous book that is a personal book about himself because he also has his life and his familys life. Over 30 years of knowing this amazing and extraordinary man two quick stories about oliver sacks because he was here in our old store at times. One of his books the one great acclaim and attention fairly early on one of them was called seeing voices a book about the deaf culture. Our reading in a packed basement space we knew this was going to be the case. About half the audience was deaf and we had signed, and he loved the energy that night was palpable. He fed off of it and the other little story was one of the other book tours he ended up in seattle with us and it was in the days before email and cell phones and all the possible devices that track us and i got a call from a woman in new york who is traveling around and she said dr. Sacks was here a couple of nights ago we had a great night but do you know where he might be now . He disappeared on him and he was such a figure that way. Lawrence weschler has done a wonderful job about writing about his life. Not at deep free about oliver sacks but the best kind of human and humanely informed biography. Im sure after the reading part of this well take questions about will seem more front like conversation to the other thing to acknowledge that the brighter lights. We have looked to be here tonight so your friends who arent here will certainly get to see and hear you if you ask questions afterwards and that will be broadcast at an appropriate time sometime soon after. Following all of that land will be in the back of the room to sign copies. Or everyone here we thank you very much for being here and please join me in giving a warm welcome to the wonderful writer, Lawrence Weschler. [applause] thank you so much and thank you all for being here. I can give a medium quick overview of how it happened and how our relationship happen i will read a particular section. Im on a 20 day book to her and trying to read a different section every night. A few people from cspan join me on the tour you can have the whole book. But anyway oliver sacks born in 1933, part of it was the class of 33 by the way. I have a very about people born in 1933. These are people who if you think about it enter puberty at the very end of the war and so the war is ending and they are just having their hormones kicking in and they have delusions of grandeur and often wild sexuality and so forth and they include oliver sacks, philip roth, susan sontag roman polanski. These are all kind of the same, can give you a whole bunch more but there is this kind of strange vitality. He was born in 33. He had a complex difficult life, early life. He had been sent, both of his parents were doctors. When he was seven years old it was the battle of written taking place and like all of the children of london especially the children of doctors he was sent to a Country School but in this case it was absolutely horrific place which he calls bray fields. He is sent with his older brother and the treatment they received there was so horrific that it really breaks the older brother who is basically as schizophrenic after that and lived in the attic of the house when he would go to london to olivers fathers house. Oliver had had a horrific time there too. Eventually comes back and he is obviously a prodigy. He is the fourth of four boys. His parents have no idea what to do with them and so his mother who was one of the first female surgeons in england would do things like she was an ob gyn surgeon and she would ring home when he was eight years old stillborn fetuses for him to dissect. Thats what you do with an 8yearold and when he was 12 she took them a long to the autopsy of a 12yearold boy who had committed suicide. All of this was done he is an intensely close relationship with her. She was always reading him her favorite novelist which was dh lawrence. Humanity by the way is just amazing. But anyway he has an extraordinary period in junior high and high school. He befriends Jonathan Miller from beyond the french the great doctor and theater director later on and other people. He goes to college at one point he gets home from oxford and his father is out on the rounds. His fathers a gp and he says oliver you never talk about girls. You never bring how many girls. Oliver says, and dad adds do you like girls . Do you like boys . And he says father i am a. Please dont tell mother. It would destroy her. The next morning his mother comes tearing down the stairs and just tears into him with what he describes as three hours of tutoring on the go cursing. You are an abomination and i wish you had never been born, lacerating him and after three hours she falls silent. They dont talk to each other for many weeks and when they resume talking the subject is never raced again in her lifetime. But that voice haunts him. He flees england as soon as he has finished his degree as a doctor from oxford and middlesex hospital, a bat out of hell. He comes to california and by the way when he told his father that he had never been, when he said he was he had never had any experiences at that point. I have always thought in his earlier life he was later i will tell you how we got to know each other but one day we went to the Natural History museum in kensington new london. We ran through dioramas hippopotamus is in the mud and he said when i was six years old this was my for one of my first sexual tendencies. A hippopotamus would make of the wonderful bed partner, dont you think . And then he said to those in the mud. Mud. But anyway by this time after he is 21 or 22 he heads to california and he has three or four years of complete out of existence. Hes in San Francisco and then in los angeles doing his residencies. He is on the fringes of the hells angels. In hells angels he has known as doctors caught because hes famous for his squat lifting. If the california state heavy weightlifting champion, 600 pounds. He is fairly open and is absolutely floridly involved in the drug scene. He takes every single drug there is an every dose and overdose in los angeles. On a friday evening he will take a milkshake of 10 times the amount of speed that would kill you but hes strong and he gets on his motorcycle in from l. A. He motorcycles to crater lake and back without stopping except for gas. And then he comes back. And then at one point he eventually looks at himself in the year and he says if i keep this up for another six months ill be dead and he began fairly quickly at that point to swear off drugs and sex. By the time i met him he had been celibate for 15 years as he would be celibate for 35 years before that. Eventually, long story which i track here, he ends up him he tries to be a bench scientist buddy so incredibly clumsy he breaks the test tubes and he spent three years developing a collection of mylan sheathing from earthworms which he then lost and all the notes of his experiments fell off on the cross bronx expressway and they eventually kicked them out. They said get out out of here and go see patients were you may not be causing so much damage. He ends up going to a hospital, home printing curable. This is now in 1967, 68, 69 and this is where what will become the awakening will be taking place. I will talk a little bit more about awakenings except to say basically remember the story from the movie if nothing else that he comes upon at that point there are 500 people being warehoused. The poorhouse. He spends all his time during these years in poorhouses in state institutions and so forth. He says thats where the jewels are. You have all the time in the world and nobodys expecting anything. But he becomes convinced that of his population of 500, 80 of them the most severely afflicted, the ones who are just human statues are somehow different from the others, the catatonic the alzheimers and those sorts of patients. There have been any number of neurologists going through before none of them have this thought he they all seem to have succumbed the r d difference from the others prevail succumbed to which called was called sleepy sick as which was a horrendous plague that followed the terrible influenza of 1819. A few years later, particularly younger ones, people in their 20s and 30s pretty much from one moment to the next from one day to the next simply came to aba halt. They froze. This was a horrendous plague it was talked about the way ages talk about if you go back and look at 1920s newspapers are terrific. It then disappears after seven years stuff the people catching it and its quickly forgotten like repressed nobody talks about it. But all these families have these evil in their houses that theyre trying to keep alive and eventually they cant. They all end up in these homes for the incurable. 30 or 40 years later theyre part of a wider population. He has something about the life that hes lead meant that he was particularly sensitive to what a friend of his called the community of the refused. People who were the most extremely distanced or afflicted. Anyway, he spent time with them, im not going to talk about this too much this evening but its in the book. At a certain point he brings them together he spends hours and hours with each of them. He has not only the ato know they are difference from each others but the moral audacity to imagine theyre completely alive inside. Which is a horrifying thought. But indeed it turns out to be the case. Then ldopa the miracle drug for parkinson is arrives. He reluctantly but decides to do it he gives it to his patients and suddenly they all come alive in the springlike revival which lasts a few weeks. They go from being frozen two years later i had an opportunity to talk to one of these people still alive in 1982 about 12 years later. I asked her, do you remember what it was like . She was kind of crumpled over. I said do you remember what it was like when you first came to . She said yes. I said, what was it like . Its been frozen for 30 years and suddenly you come to. She said suddenly i was talking. I said, do you remember your first words . She said, oh yes. I said what were your first words . She said suddenly i said im talking. They went from this mozart he and idle into a period of horrific tribulation where they started having terrible terrible side effects and side effects of the side effects. They thought it was a question of titration they just couldnt get it right. It was just bedlam. For several months. Then some of them didnt even make it out. Others subsided into a kind of accommodation crumpled is distance which was nowhere near as beautiful as the spring had been but not as bad as the tribulation had been. And better than the previous 30 years had been. He wrote the book about that. In 1973 it was published. It is his masterpiece. If youve read oliver and other things of olivers and you have not read that you have a great experience ahead of you. Positively mellow lillian its amazing. It was virtually completely ignored. It was celebrated by the likes of auden and frank commode and people like that. But doctors, generally didnt believe it. It wasnt doubleblind it was an quantitative charged. It wasnt peerreviewed. It was this weird thing of case studies of stories of these people. This is not what neurology was in those days, it was very sideload and very quantitative and so forth very rigorous. Many people, to the extent that the doctors of the medical community knew of him they either ignored him or just actively disbelieved him. Then what happens we are now and 73, by the way, to give you an idea, years later in 1982 to 83 when i interviewed the publisher in london of awakenings he said that the First Edition had had the First Edition of the hardcover had 1500 copies they had not yet sold through it 12 years later. After the disappointment of this oliver does something completely dumb and in reeling and dismay his mother dies shortly thereafter this. He goes on a walk on the mountains of norway by himself without telling anyone. He has a runin with a bowl or so he says his friends think it was probably a cow. In any case, he falls off the edge of a cliff and goes falling down this childs him ends up on the bottom having shattered his leg he is incredibly large incredibly strong but just the weight of the body hitting the weight of his body hitting the leg that he lands on his shatters the leg. Its becoming nightfall and hes down there by himself for eight hours and then at some point some people happen to be walking by and locate him and get help. Eventually he ends up in the very hospital in england where he had been a medical student in london. He has this extreme exit sensualist experience where the leg doesnt feel like part of his body but its not just that is not feeling it, its a foreign alien thing he tries to throw it out of his bed, he strong so he can do it. It goes flying out after it. He is deeply alienated goes through this infernal experience. He get he gets better and everythings okay but he resolves is now going to read a book about that. He so unnerved by the fact that nobody believes him about the other book that he begins to have neurotic feelings about this book. He falls into a 10 year long Writers Block. Its in the middle of all that the last four years before then that i write him a letter. Nobody had read that book but as it happened i went to santa cruz or somebody had read it and i thought i was graduating thrust it into my chest they said he had to read it. When i did get around to it now its 1979 or so i wrote him a letter and said in the book you call the hospital mount carmel. Which is i get the illusion st. John of the cross dark night of the soul. Awakening from that. But this book doesnt seem christian mystical to me. Much more capitalistic much more jewish mystical. I get an eight page handwritten letter back from him. He said its abmy first cousin is the Israeli Foreign minister. Both of us have the same other constant which is the guy who did little abner. First cousins of each other. In my greatest hero is a. R. Luria the soviet neuroscientist neuropsychologist who may well be related to luria the great founder of kabbalah in palestine in the 15 and 16th century. I finished my first book i was living in la in those days. Its rejected by a whole slew of new york publishers on the grounds this is 1980 that they love the book but how could one probably possibly publish a book by an artist named robert irwin. I sent it to the new yorker i got very lucky they accepted it and i moved to new york. Im looking for somebody else to spend time hanging out with to write my next book that i decide i will go check out this robert irwin who is not known and in those days is living 1980 a81, he is living the life of a recluse hes church mouse poor he spends all his time in the backwoods of poorhouses and institution Little Sisters of the poor. Bronx state and things like that. Hes kind of completely stock in this book hes trying to write. Its at that point been six years and to form his blockage takes his graph a mania. And he cant bring it together. In retrospect the four years when i arrived seem to be the hinge let years in his life. He couldve easily gotten stuck there and we would never have heard more of him. Theres an incredible struggle to bring the book to conclusion among other things. I spent the next four years basically hanging out with him. I would do other things for the new yorker but when i was in town i could be sure that any given night he would have nobody else he was seeing we go to dinner two or three times a week. We go on rounds together. Which is where i met the patient to describe a second ago. We go to london, california and so forth. I would interview many of his friends, Jonathan Miller and tom gone the poet and things like this. At a certain point i got ready to write, now i should read the book. He was getting to the end of his tenure blockage and finally the book was getting ready to publish and i went off for a summer and indexed my notes that i had thousands of pages of notes it was 250 pages long it was going to be one of those threepart new yorker series we used to have in those days. I was about 75 pages into it and he asked me to stop. He couldnt deal with the sexuality being talked about. At that point in his life felt that the fact that he was homosexual was a blight by his existence. He hoped that it didnt contaminate his science he tried very hard to keep that from happening he had been celibate it had no bearing at all. I agreed with him that it didnt except that you really code, although it didnt affect his directly his own attitude toward it was filled with the kind of things that allow them to empathize with other people and be part of the community i just said theres no way i could write. Also you couldnt account for the drug stuff which in turn also made it possible for him to imagine a living statue might have left going on inside. We agreed i wouldnt write it i set it aside and he said after i die i dont care what happens. As it happens, three months before his death he ordered me to go back and write the book. He said now you have to read it. Its like having had an Aircraft Carrier going 100 miles an hour and being told to stop, diamond 35 years 35 years later abits a book that has a long its not a biography it makes no pretense of being a biography. It has a fairly long introduction and the meat of the book is my account of those four years of what he was like during those four years. During these hinge years the years in which i say it was a beanpole sideshow to his capacious quixote. He was much different than he was going to be later on. By the end of this period he will finally get the book out and immediately afterward all the stuff that had been blocked out he was International Bestseller and becomes completely different world. He becomes the teddy bear neurologist we know and love. I thought in keeping with reading Something Different each time that i would read you four or five pages from the period when he is finally getting to the end of the writing of this book. Hes written so many different versions its just been ab this much of the book is just trying to get him to finish it. I will redo some passions we are now in 1983. October 27 hes reading on on rent and says i was utterly engrossed that it was like reading a National History of alien species beautifully described cogic coherent wondrous terrible it was almost an epiphany when i realized this wasnt me she was describing. My people, us. He was least political person ive ever met in some profound way. He just was not aware was going on. Years later he would be sent by robert silvers he heard about the seeing voices book a second ago. The genius of that book was robert silvers in the new yorker few. Who had the idea that when Gallaudet College suddenly fell into huge crisis because this is the National College for the death and they attempted to put a hearing person as the president of the College Students rose up in a kind of belated berkeley uprising and they sent oliver down to cover it as a journalist and oliver suddenly found himself a hero among the students that he was there and they would thrust a banner or poster in his hands and he led the march and it was exactly like the scene in modern times that would later be his only political time but this is different. He says the conversation turns to the general lack of political interest in his life from early on. Eric was very interested and was in a Political Group in prep school but i was oblivious, my mind wandering to galvanize asian electrostatic currents and so forth. Despite all my agitation id been wrapped up in my own thoughts my entire life. November 14, oliver spent the weekend in boston at the book fair next to eric booth. Eric coren was famous for those of you who subscribe to the tls he had the remainders comb for many years he was a very famous arcane Antiquarian Book dealer. Oliver spent the weekend in boston at the book fair next to erics booth writing and completing the umpteen version of his leg book apple one. I wasnt abi love the idea of being private and public view. Where is fall apart when im all alone. One day he called me up and said, has anybody done a phenomenology of ends . I said i dont know. He said because i cant stand to be in my house when im in my house, he was in a little house on city island off the bronx in new york. I always be kafka my house. If i can get to in the name okay. If i can get to and in i can write in the dining room oven in november 24 hes back from one of these trips. Hes an obsessive funk. I am living zenos paradox. Zenos paradox the paradox of you shoot an arrow at the target zeno the great valley attic philosopher from the island of elias and preplatonic aristocratic rates. If you send an arrow toward his target and haskell halfway there before can get there and then haskell halfway the remaining distance and halfway the remaining distance. It never gets there. Which is why of course Saint Sebastian didnt die of wounds he died of fright. Using zenos paradox im in the el yacyk frenzy i write 50 pages ad 85 more take out 10 and 20 take out five add another 20 i write endlessly, eat obsessively and im sick all the while. Ive had a strong feeling of ceramic impulses last few weeks. Though i may externalize it and say its Jim Silverman whose editor at summit books. Its an internal enslavement. He let loose the enormous which rises up and blots out the entire world even the world of dreams. Sounds fun, i tell him. I asked oliver how things are going with bob silver at the new york review of books where he started publishing what he thought of the case study he recently sent him, he liked it though perhaps i made his life more difficult by sending him 17 more revised versions. December 3 oliver tells me about a new 70 page section of the endless epilogue entitled the heat craft, his london publisher has completely jettisoned the coaster rica version which was 200 pages long and all the things that happen in the jungle of costa rica while he was there. All that damned vegetation. Now he was doing a whole new transit through grad, grind town. His years of graduate school and coke addition. Really, he says, neurology and the soul, thats what the epilogue is about. What all my work is about. December 13 at silvermans office trying to put the god dam leg book to bed i sit in a silvermans young associate editor eileen smith presents her condensed condensation of the epilogue. Oliver is absolutely hopeless dealing with editors. Next time abim going to deal directly with the printers. Insights that publishers and editors altogether so i stayed on to mediate things. I momentarily put in mind the passage from Walter Benjamins ruminations the latin word text and means web. No ones text is more tightly woven than Marcel Preuss to him nothing was tight or durable enough. From his publisher we know that proofreading habits who the despair of the typesetters. The galleys always went back covered with marginal notes but not a single misprint had been corrected. All Available Space was being used for fresh tax. Eileen has distilled more than 300 brilliant but somewhat chaotic pages of olivers most recent epilogue and addenda into a coherent 30 pages. Of which the first 25 are quite good. There is a flaw at page 25 it needs about five pages of fleshing out addresses okay. I start to complement in her. Then focus quickly on the particular need to expand the contraception about athe climax of the book and it needs to swell and blossom. So as to diffuse olivers tendency to diffuse panic. I tell oliver whats needed here is five pages not 50. 50 will be were simply useless. Five pages and then i leave them to go to work. Eileen walks me to the door i dont know if i can handle if he takes it all apart again and it occurs to me that oliver intimidates though to hold him in all that the way to deal with him in a sort of situation is as you would an eightyearold prodigy which is to say you need amazement and respect with script paternalistic forbearance. Oliver, will you just behave yourself . Headmaster what sent home report card to young old birthparents with the following comment, oliver sacks will go far if he doesnt go too far. I call over the next morning, howd it go . The next evening. How did it go . They were there until 12 30 a. M. You must be tired. That was just the beginning, he says, eileen had been calling the garage to make sure they stay open. They said they would but i got lost getting there and by the time i got there they were closed. I only got back to my house this morning at 7 30 a. M. What did you do in the meantime . Did you go to the hotel . No i walked around in ambulatory days pausing to eat dinner every hour on the hour. I ate a great deal. Im gobbling up upper denture endemic potential world of cart. Perseveration of the mouth and the mind. He seemed satisfied with the final product. Its not schmaltzy says, answering some colons misgivings who said the coaster rica version was small. It might be lubricated by schmaltz. He continues doubting universes but my repetition, he still worried about that dam epilogue. Not strictly repetition whether i approach and reapproach from a different side something that abto get my bearings. I meet up with oliver at summit books the next day. Then off to a rambling lunch at the beanstalk across the street. Come pick me up at 12 30 pm he told me over the phone by then i will have completed or if not abandoned it. Our conversation turns to perennial topic will constant concern. I dont have reverence for the text, i take liberties, he acknowledges going all the way back to awakenings. But i do have reverence for the book of nature. There i wouldnt so much as alter a, the littlest lie of a scientist will tear his scientists in half. I can imagine freud as a physician would ever have sacrificed his patients to his theories. I feel the same about weight joe mike about lori and myself. Faded in mid waterloo. One time i overheard a conversation of one person who knew him another person who did it and the second person said, did oliver ever talk to himself and the first person said, especially when he talked to you. [laughter] at which point you Free Associates to the question of dearness. He was inhumanly clever but also in human period. He objected by calling my patients dear as in i saw a dear old woman this afternoon. What does dear he asked me probably. Suddenly all sense of dearness flood the world and i felt i was dying in interstellar space. The next morning i was saved by a letter from gloria which began my dear doctor sax. You might well ask of harpers fellow did. How can Lithium Carbonate speed dear to one but cant be and is dear to me. With me nowadays a dear is often botanical. When my leg came back and said my dear old thing your home again you wouldnt be home, which is to say dear sweet home unless potassium carbonate were exactly like potassium carbonate. Thats why truthfulness is so important. Which brings us ashes clearly talking about chewing on awakenings and his anxiety throughout this book. Which brings us back full circle. It has something to do with fidelity too. Brave field his hellhole world time boarding school was a world of fickle relations where no one was faithful to anyone in the emotional stability of the inorganic world was crucial in saving me he says the wall size of the Natural History museum in london they had a periodic table of all the omens on a long wall and examples of each of them at the age of eight and nine and 10 he reconstructed his life looking at the wall. Just giving you a sense of how incredibly he really was on a thread through those years it wasnt clear he was gonna make it out. The book finally gets published, by the way, the day the book goes to the printers for good hes out walking on city island and slipped on ice and breaks his other leg. And calling is wonderful editor sent him a telegraph that says oliver, you would do anything for a footnote. [laughter] but the book does get out finally and indeed all the other stuff thats been blocked behind it comes pouring out and he becomes oliver, who you will get to know. Maybe ill stop there and opened it up to questions. The book focuses those four years and then the last 70 pages are the ensuing 3540 years in which he becomes the godfather of my daughter and then after 35 years of celibacy finally allows himself to fall in love. I should rephrase that. He was falling in love constantly. But then being fallen in love with even more often. Finally seven years before he died he had had a death scare with a cancer of the eyeball. Which he survives. Somehow it allowed him to fall in love. My daughter by then was about 20. Shes a little bit older than that. He was like a teenager. He was giddy. My daughter would mother him through this. For all of us we just saw the nuts come undone and it was beautiful. Then indeed a cancer that seven years later mustache decides to his liver and he lived six months and dies. Nails a landing of a beautiful slow death what which i talk about in the book. Incredibly productive at the end. Be loud [laughter]. [inaudible question] [laughter] this essentially billy hayes indeed wrote a beautiful memoir called insomniac city. Billy hayes is the writer who became his lover. The two of them were besotted with each other at the end. All the way through. Its kind of a besotted memoir. I dont contradict or argue with any of it. And everything you know thats wonderful about oliver is wonderful. That was him. Having said that, up until now i feel like this is the first attempt to portray oliver and fall because in addition to being all that he was incredibly complicated person he could be a monster, he suffered the narcissism of all tourism. You never knew who was coming to dinner. He abhe could be incredibly rude. He was selfinvolved. Constantly. Yet with his patients he was totally there and i think to my mind that makes all the good stuff all the more amazing to see him rustling. This is really a period in his life where he was wildly neurotic. And to see him in a certain sense one of my favorite things somebody wrote me about afterwards is that this isnt a biography with this kind of teleology and so forth, this is a book you get to see oliver happen. When we would go on rooms he would often say that he was a medical oncologist. If you think about aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty and epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge ontology is the philosophy of being stuck what its like to be. Or what being is. For oliver, and he would say this, the diagnostic question is, how are you to these people at the run of extremity. What is it like to be you . How do you be . With this book i tried to turn the question back on him. Because he wasnt just a teddy bear and he wasnt just the besotted the lovely person that really talks about although he was dead in your world. He was absolutely tortured ending lived in incredibly difficult life. When he himself tells the story late in his life he tells it from a perspective of serenity. He was not syrian. He was tortured. For that person to be the person who all of you know and that not to be an act. He was dead as a person too. To me its more powerful if you have a sense of what was at stake in what he had to fight his way through to get there which was in turn why he was so extraordinarily good at seeing other people fight you the things. Its an amazing story but one part i dont understand is the part of torture about being homosexual. He was in San Francisco in the 70s and enjoying it and then for 30 years hes celibate. 35. [laughter] the part is how is it possible how is all this possible the one party doesnt understand is his homophobia. I guess you could say. It was such an interesting experience during those first four years that we were together he very slowly approached it and then pulled away and then reveal little bit more gradually he would reveal the full catastrophe of this horrific fact about himself. I came from california i grew up in la and im like oliver, nobody cares. You know that nobody cares right . Its not only that he was in San Francisco he lived a few blocks from stonewall when stonewall happened. In 1969. That was the very summer of awakenings. That was the summer when the springlike reckoning had turned into tribulation for those three months he was at the hospital 22 hours a day and slept on cots in the hospital he completely missed it. He would say to me sometimes, you remind me of my shrink. By the way he was an analysis. Two or three times a week for 50 years with the same man. As he said, i think we are getting somewhere. [laughter] s analyst would say, oliver, you are the least affected by Gay Liberation of anybody ive ever met. I would say similar things to him and he would say no, i sit in my prison cell, the gate flung open the doors of the prison flung open and i listen to the dancing outside but i stay in my cell. He would often quote grace paley extraordinary lined every person invented to serve the open destiny of life. He talked about what his interest was in the world of his patients was the intersection of faith and freedom. And that everybodys life no matter what the extremity was an open book. I would say, yes, oliver, yours too and he would say no everybodys life is an open book except for my sexuality which is a closed book as closed as close can be. That goes back. I think by the time you get to the point where his mother lays that on him really you have a sense of thats the voice inside of him that keeps lacerating and is not just random voice is the voice of the person he was closest to in the world. Was he religious . Was he religious. His parents were orthodox jewish. I think that was the voice that was condemning him. He called it deuteronomy cool i would call it leviticus. And yet the part of judaism that he did love was friday nights when his mother would light the candles. Saturday was all analytic prohibitions but friday was the sabbath. He would return to that. He gave this extraordinary lecture which i talk about a great deal in the book on the neurology of the soul at the end somebody raised her hand and said what do you think of the afterlife of the soul . He said i can make nothing of that concept i am precisely fascinated and compelled by the embodiment of the soul. He was asked do you believe in god he said i believe in the divine. Mendelson was divine. I believe in grace, grace of fluid movement. He was deeply at some level tuned to his jewishness but he was not religious. He certainly would have been beyond nice stick side. His religion if anything was darwinism. And as such he was very much opposed to the science of which much of neurology prospectus. When it turned completely to charts and doubleblind experiments and so forth. When it was all about the disease people had rather than leave the disease. He was trying to do a neurology of identity which you think about is almost a contradiction in terms. How can you do a science of the individual but thats what he was into. He was into the infinite expanse inside every individual patient he met which was not what neurology was into. I should mention that on his last birthday when people knew he was dying there was a party for him and the head of neurology at Columbia University got up and said that nowadays, this is three years ago, four years ago, nowadays at the Columbia Neurology Department and the medical school of those who apply for residencies in neurology after they get their medical diploma fully 70 mentioned oliver sacks. Thats the transformation. Independent of what he meant for deaf people and what he met for so many different kinds of patients. He almost singlehandedly changed medicine. [inaudible question] he mentions the lava mozart in mendelson in particular also buff. And how intimate and complex they both are. He would play he would talk regularly about music within the context of people who work on music, parkinsonian patients and how you can bring them back with music. He would talk about how the thing about music is that it moves you and you move with it. Music was extremely important to him. Much more so then certainly then film. He was dense when it came to popular culture. One day he called me up and said, ive been dealing with this this guy, hes about 40 years old but he his stock at a ahe had a blow and stuck at the age of 22. All he talks about is this rock group he just loved. I said he says but i cant get the name and im writing about him i need the name and i said what you think will stop he said i think its the happy corpses. I said the grateful dead . He said thats it but then by the way he became very Close Friends with mickey hart. They had this picasso neurological interest together. There you go. [laughter] i have a question about your friendship with him. It sounds like he was fairly forthcoming information during the interviews that were not actually things written about. Just curious about that dynamic. He at one point this is long before. I think about what i do musically im playing the piece in every once in a while ahead grace notes i do that anticipate things are going to come. At one point he says to me, we are talking about sexuality and how he is celibate he says i regularly fall in love with straight men whose daughters are become the godfather for. [laughter] im a fairly unusual reporter. Im not allowed to teach journalism. In which i have no problem having very intense friendships with the people in writing about. And maintaining them as friends afterwards. For example, the thought that i was part of the herculean effort to get them out of the Writers Block and i edited large portions of it. We were all talking to each other. Its not your typical writer subject relationship. Another thing with all my writing it due to interviews like q a as we have conversations. So if i were to tape it which i didnt do, half of the conversation would be me id be telling long stories about things that robert irwin headset. I had no problem doing that because you get different times of responses than you do standard q a. Nobodys ever done a q a with oliver sacks which is 20 minutes of describing what robert irwin makes of perceptual issues and so forth. Ive lived a life rack correcting inhibition and im not going to end it now. Cant we just be friends . And we stayed Close Friends. He was a great godfather. Anything else . Thank you all so much for coming. [applause] and i will be back there. Come talk to me [inaudible] some of these authors have appeared on book tv and you can watch them online at booktv. Org. Are we ready . Okay. Hello everyone. And welcome today, to the annual southern festival of books, a celebration of the written word. My name is Gloria Ballard and myits my pleasure to be here to host this session my country tis of the, to essay collections and to introduce the authors, kendra allen and jennine cap crucet who is right here next to me before i get to that introduction there are housekeeping things i need to take care of