Weschler. We will give her the word. But Lawrence Weschler as often his books have always had Something Interesting going on. I say this, he sort of in the singular way writes about, has written about unique people or sometimes theres some extra situations is welcome often at the heart of his books are these unique and unusual and distinct people. And this is a time with often it feels like a lot of the force of our work to try to make assaulting exactly alike and something conformed and conventional. Hes done this, the last time he was here in seattle was just a couple of years ago with a man most of what well known in the world of film, walter murch who but they kept in touch and for all this work is done as a film editor, one of the foremost, i mean, oscars and everything, is also an astrophysicist by heart. With sort of rogue theories in the book calls ways passing in the night was a dialogue about what he was doing. Hes done this in various ways and various times. Tonight he is here for a book come in this case, someone would really have heard of, that being the late doctor oliver sacks. And this book which chronicles 30 year friendship called and how are you, dr. Sacks . But its a marvelous book that is probably also one of his most personal books but himself because he also has his life come his familys life over 30 years of knowing this amazing an extraordinary man. Two quick stories about oliver sacks because he was here in the old store a few times. One of his books that one great acclaim and attention come these are fairly early on, when was called seeing voices. Its a book about deaf culture. Our reading in the old store which was packed in the basement space but we knew this would be the case in terms of who all was coming. About half of the audience was deaf and we had it signed. He loved that, this whole, the energy that night was palpable and he sent off of it and gave it back. He was quite an energetic fellow. The other story was one his his other book two were in seattle with us, one of those, the days before email and cell phones and all the other possible devices that track us, and i got a call from a woman in new york who helped arrange his traveling and i said dr. Sacks was a couple of days. Lovely, great. When a great night. She said yes, yes. But you know what he might be now . He had disappeared on them. He was such a figure that way. Lawrence weschler has done a beautiful job earning about his life. Its not the biography of oliver sacks but its the best kind of human and humanely informed biography. Im sure after the reading part of this he will take questions and that will feed a lot more of what should be a lovely and lively conversation. The other thing to say and technology are the brighter lights. We have booktv here tonight, so your friends who are not here will possibly come certainly get to see and hear you if you ask questions afterwards. So this will be broadcast at an appropriate time we will probably find out sometime soon after. Following all that he will be in the back to sign copies of this and some of his other books. Without again for everyone here we thank you for being here and now please join in getting him him walk back to the wonderful writer Lawrence Weschler. [applause] thank you so much. Thank you all for being here. Maybe ill give a medium, quick overview of how this book happen, how our relationship happen and then i will read a particular section. Im on like like a 20 day bookr and trying to read a different section of urbanite so if you people see and control you can have all book anyway, oliver sacks, born in 1933 part of it was the class of 33. I have syria people born in 1933. These are people who come if you think about it, enter puberty at the very end of the war. So the war is ending and that just having their hormones kicking in and that kind of delusions of grandeur and often kind of wild sexual and so forth. 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 do i called oliver the next morning, how did it go . Or the next evening, how did it go . They were there until 12 30 a. M. You must be tired. That was the beginning he says. Eileen had called the garage to make sure they stay open. I got lost getting there and by the time i got there they were closed so i only got back this morning at 7 30. What did you do in the meantime . Did you go to the hotel . No, i walked around in ambulatory days, pausingto eat dinner every hour on our. I ate a great deal. As he tells me the story at six that evening he is eating row, heart row. Im gobbling up a potential world of carpet, 1 billion, trillion. The separation of both the mouth and the mind. But he seems satisfied with the final product. Its not schmaltz he says. Answering some of collins misgivings who says the divers and with schmaltz. Theres thought there, another audible sip of row. It may be lubricated by schmaltz. He continues downing universes. But my repetition, he still worrying about that epilogue. Im not strictlyrepetition, i reapproach from a different side. Lichtenstein to get my bearings. I meet up with oliver the next day and off to a rambling lunch at the beanstalk across the street. Come pick me up at 12 38 he told me over the phone and by then mei will have completed or moreas not abandon it. Our conversation turns to the topic nvof constant concern. I dont take how reverence for the test, i take liberties, he acknowledges going all the way back to awakenings but i do have reverence for the book of nature and there i wouldnt so muchas alter a,. The littlest lie of a scientist will tear his science in half. I cant imagine that freud as a physician would ever have sacrificed his patients to his theories. I feel the same way about gloria and myself. But and but, this would be typical. He often faded in mid monologue. One time i overheard a conversation about one person who knew him and the other person didnt and the second person said that oliver ever talk to himself in the first person, especially when he talked to you. At which point he Free Associates to the question of dearness. There was an editor at harpers , and think tank or i have no doubt was inhumanly clever but also in human. He objected to calling my. Patient dear as in i sawyearold woman this afternoon. What is dear he asked me probably suddenly all sense of dearness flood the world and i thought i was dying in interstellar space. The next morning though i was saved by a letter from loreal which began my dear doctor sacks. You might well ask this fellow how can Lithium Carbonate be to one but it is dear to me. With me though nowadays, the deer is often botanical. When my leg came back i said my dear old thing, yourhome again. It wouldnt be home which is to say dear sweet home unless potassium carbonate or exactly like potassium carbonate. Thats why truthfulness is so important. Which brings us hes clearly talking about chewing on awakenings. Which brings us back fullcircle. This has something to do with fidelity to. Rafe felt that his hellhole boardingschool was a world of fickle relations where no one was faithful to anyone. And the emotional stability of the inorganic world was crucial in saving me. As you know he says that the wall at the national History Museum in london at a periodic table of all the elements on the wall and examples of each of them and at the age of eight and nine and 10 he reconstructed his life looking at that wall. A pause. Young joness biography of freud there is a bout paragraph about freuds respect for the facts, even if it should takeyears to surface. Ill stop there but im just giving you a sense of how incredibly, he really was on a thread for those years that he wasnt clear he was going to make it out and is what gets published and by the way the day the book goes to the printers for good , hes out walking on cityisland and he slipped on ice and he breaks his other leg. And colin is wonderful editor in england since in the telegraph that says oliver, you would do anything for afootnote. But the book does get out finally and then in the, all the other stuff has been blocked at the time comes pouring out and hebecomes oliver who you will get to know and who will start going on tours and guns up in places like this. Maybe ill stop there and open it to questions and so forth. As i say, the book basically focuses those four years and the last 70 pages are the ensuing 35, 40 years in which for one thing hebecomes the godfather of my daughter. And then after 35 years of celibacy he allows himself to fall in love. I should rephrase that. It was falling in love constantly but, and being fallen in love with more often and he would notallow them. Finally evan years before he died he had had a death scare with a cancer of the eyeball. Which he survives and somehow allowed him to fall in love. My daughter by then was about 20 and shes a little bit older andhe was like a teenager. He was giddy. Hes handsome, do you think he likes me . Its all a flutter and its just amazing and my daughter would mother him through this. But for all of us, you saw the knots, and done and it was beautiful and then indeed , thats the cancer that seven years later messed has to sizes to his liver and he lives six months anddies. A beautiful slow death which i talk about in the book to but incredibly productive at the end. And so thats the book. Questions . In the back. I said be loud. That was good. When i first saw your book , bill hayes two books, i was like. [inaudible] this is billy hayes and deidra, a beautiful no more and its called insomniac city, billy hayes the writer became his lover. And the two of them were besotted with each other at the end all the way through. And it is kind of a besotted memoir and i dont contradict, i dont argue with any of it. And everything you know thats wonderful about oliver is wonderful and that was him read having said that, until now w i feel like this is the first attempt to portray oliver in full because in addition to being all that he was an incrediblycomplicated person. He was, could be a monster. He suffered from the narcissism of all truism. He, you never knew was coming to dinner. He could be incredibly rude. He was incredibly selfinvolved. Constantly, and yet his patients, he was totally there t. And i think to my mind that makes all the good stuff all the more amazing. To see him wrestling and i have him, this is really a time in his life where he was wildly, and in a certain sense one of my favorite things that somebody wrote me about afterwards is this isnt a biography where theres a kind of teleology and so forth of the book where you get to seeoliver happen. When we would go on rounds, he would often say that he was a clinical oncologist. And if you think about aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty and epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge, ontology is the philosophy of being. What its like to be and or what being is. And for oliver, he would say this. The diagnostic question is how are you . To these people at the rim of extremity. E what is it like to be you . How do you be . And for this book i tried to turn that question back on him because he wasnt just a teddy bear and he wasnt just the decidedly lovely person billy talks about although he was that in their world. He was an absolutely tortured and had lived an incredibly difficult life. When he himself tells the story late in his life he tells it from the perspective of serenity. He was not serene. He was tortured and for that person to be the person who all of you know that not to be anact , he was that other person to. Just me is more powerful and you have a sense of what was at stake and what he had to akfight his way through to get there which is why he was so extraordinarily good at seeing other people through their things. Is an amazing story but one part i dont understand is the part of his torture about being homosexual. He was in San Francisco in the early 70s and enjoying it. And then 30 years hes celibate . The part is how is it possible, how is all that possible and the one part b doesnt understand is his homophobia, i guess you could say. Andindeed , it was such an excruciating experience during those first four years that we were together, he very slowly approached it and then pulled away and vehe revealed a little bit more and gradually he would reveal mothe full catastrophe of this for a thick fact about himself. And i came from california, i grew up in la and nobody cares, you know that nobody cares. Not only that he was inSan Francisco for those few years , but that he lived a few blocks from stonewall when stonewall happened. In 1969, but that was the very summer of awakening. That was the summer when the spring like awakening had turned into tribulation for those three months and he was at the hospital 22 hours a elday and slept on hot at the hospital, he completely missed it. He would say sometimes your mind me of my shrink. He was in analysis two or three times a week for 50 years with the same man. And as he said towards the end, i think were getting somewhere but his analyst would say oliver, you are the least effective by Gay Liberation of anyoneive met and i would say similar things to him and he would say no he said , i sit in my prison cell, the door flung open, 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 say, he would often quote grace paleys extraordinary line at every person serves the open destiny of life and he would talk about what his interest was in the world of his patients was the intersection of eighth and freedom. And everybodys life no matter what the extremity was an open book. And i say yes oliver, and yours too and he would say no, everybodys life is book accept my sexuality which is a closed book and its as close as close can be and that goes back, i think by the time you get to the point where his mother lays out on him, its really , you have a sense of that as the voice inside of him that keeps lacerating in and its not just a random voice, its the voice of the person he was closest to in the world in many ways. And was he religious . His parents as i say were Orthodox Jewish and i think that by the way was the voice was condemning him. It was precisely, he called it deuteronomy call, i would call it a medical. And yet the part of judaism that we love was friday nights when his mother would like the candles red saturday was all hermetic prohibitions but friday was the sabbath and he would return to that red he was the visit ordinary lecture which i talk about a great deal in the book on the neurology of the soul and at the end somebody raised their hands and said what do you think of anthe afterlife of the soul . And he said i can make nothing of that concept. I am precisely fascinated, i am compelled by the embodiment of the soul. He was asked to you believe in god and he said i believe in the divine. And also in the less divine,i believe in the grace of fluid movement. But he was deeply at some level kind of tune to his jewishness but he wasnt religious. He certainly would have been on the agnostic side and his religion if anythingwas darwinism. And as such he was very much opposed to the scientism of much of what neurology was practiced when he was starting there when it had turned completely to charts and doubleblind experiments and so forth. When it was all about the disease people had rather than the people who had the disease. He was trying to do a neurology of identity which a you think about as almost a contradiction in terms. How can you do a science of the individual thats what he was into and he was into the infinite expanse inside of everyindividual patient he met. Which was knocked what standard neurology was into. I should mention on his last birthday when peopleknew he was dying , 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 the car only a Neurology Department and medical school, of those who apply for residency in neurology after they gettheir , fully 70 percent mention oliver sacks, that the transformation he made. But what he meant for so many different kinds ofpatients. He almost singlehandedly changed medicine in neurology, a generational shift. Yes. You mentioned mozart and mendelson, two of the most intimate and in their way complex composers of all. Its a fascinating connection there. He mentions the love of mozart and mendelson and also box by the way and how intimate and complex table bar. He would play. He would talk regularly about music within the context of people who were on music, parkinsonian patience and how you couldbring them back with music. He would talk about how the thing about music is that it moves you. And you move with it and so forth. Music was extremely important to him. Much more so than certainly film, he was a complete dunce when it came to popular culture. One day he called me up and said ive been dealing with this guy who hes 40 years old but he had a blow, he was stuck at age 22 and all he talks about is this rock group that he just lovesand i i said , but i cant get the name and im writing about him, i need the name and he said what do you think . And he said i think the happy corpses and i said the grateful dead and he said thats it. Then by the way he became Close Friends with mickeyhart. They kept this percussive interest together. Over there, yes. I have a question about your friendship with him and what was it like when you first started spending more time with him as a subject with the piece you intended to write and im curious what point he realized it was a friendship and it sounds like he was fairly forthcoming with information during interviews that were not actually things he wanted to be written about so im curious about that dynamic. He had one point, this was long before. I have, i think about what i did musically, im playing a piece and every once in a while ill have these grace notes that i do anticipate eggs are going to come at one point he says to me , were talking about sexuality and how he celibate and he says i regularly fall in love with treatment whose daughters i become the godfathers for. And i mean, im a fairly unusual reporter. Im not a journalist school, i have no problem having very intense friendships the people im writing about and maintaining them as friends afterwards. And that was certainly true of robert irwin and for example the thought that i was part of the herculean effort to get him out of that writers block. I had a little large portions of it and we were all talking to eachother and so forth , its not your typical writers object relationship and i think generally about my writing, i dont do interviews like you in days. We haveconversations. And so if i were to take for examplewhich i didnt do , half of the conversation would be me. I would tell it be telling him long conversations about the things robert irwin had said and i have no problem doing that because you get different kinds of responses and you do if you do a standard un day because nobodys a q a with robert sacks which is 20 minutes of describing what robert irwin makes up perceptual issues and so forth. Though we were just great friends and all the more so when im literally at the edcrucial moments as ive lived the life rack in how do you put it, ive lived a life rack in ambition and im not going to end it now. Cant we just be friends . And yes, we stayed Close Friends. And he was a great godfather. As anything else . Listen, thank you all so much for coming. [applause] and ill be back there i guess. So come and d talk to me back there. Tonight on the communicators, mark randolph, cofounder of netflix and author of the book that will never work shares his experiences learning online streaming service. April 14, 1998 hour cto a few keys and we were live and it didnt take long when we got that first dating and we cheered and began open bottles of champagne and then two or three minutes later ding ding, three more orders and we were so excited and then we got two more orders and in all the excitement we lost track of things until someone noticed that its been a while since the is wrong. And is it unplugged, is there a problem and it turned out in the first 15 minutes of being online, we had crashed all of our servers. Mark randolph tonight at 8 pm eastern on the communicators on cspan2. Are watching a special edition of book tv erin during the week while members of congress are in their district due to the coronavirus pandemic read tonight global history. First brown universityspeter address talks about the relationship between sex drugs, alcohol, backhoe, caffeine , opium , cocaine and war area and then Harvard University history professor Vincent Brown articles 18thcentury slave revolts that took place in jamaica known as tachys ruble. And later marie ronna provides a history of latin america at the wisconsin book festival in madison. And enjoyable tv now and over theweekend. Cspan has roundtheclock coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic and its all available ondemand at cspan. Org coronavirus. Watch white house briefings, updates from governors and state officials , track the spread throughout the us and the world with interactive maps. Watch ondemand anytime unfiltered at cspan. Org coronavirus read. We are ready to get started. Thank you so much forbeing here. My name is edward walter, curator of lectures at townhall seattle and on behalf of townhall , are up in the cafc right over here aand our special guest tonight is zeno matt howard, we are set up in the library showing off cool math games and activities. I am so excited to welcome you to tonights very special
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