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 n