Chief executives and leadership styles. Visit our website, cspan. Org the president to learn more about president and historical features and order your copy today whether wherever books and ebooks are sold. Good evening. Welcome and thank you all very much forbeing here tonight. We are delighted to have someone whos been here, here meaning this store but our original location good number of times, approaching 30 years now. And having Lawrence Weschler back and for him to come to seattle. For us it feels like having a member ofthe family back. He has a literal family in seattle so thats part of his seattle visit and hes an author too, Tony Weschler but Lawrence Weschler has often come, his books have always had Something Interesting going on and i say this, hes sort of in a singular way right about, has written about unique people or sometimes theres extraordinary situations as well but often at the heart of his books are these unique and unusual and distinct people and this is a time when often it feels like a lot of the forces at work are to make us all seem exactly alike and conformed and conventional. The last time he was here in seattle was just a couple of years ago with a man most known and quite well known in the worldof film , walter murch but he kept in touch and he was a film editor and one of the most foremost ones that won an oscar and everything but also an astrophysicist by heart awith sort of rogue theories and a book called waves passing in the night was a book by wren and walters of a dialogue. So hes done this in various ways and in various times. Tonight hes here for a book by in this case someone we om really have heard of and doctor oliver sacks. Training. He also has his life in his familys life in over 30 years he was here a few times, one of them is called seeing voices. A book about death culture. Our reading was a packed basement space. We knew this is when to be the case in terms of who is coming, half the audience was death unto death, he loved the energy that night was probable that he fed off of it and give it backtt he was an energetic fella. Another book tour in seattle with us was the day before email and all the other possible devices to t track us d they got a call from a woman in new york who helped us arrange their traveling around and she said i saw himut a couple nights lovely great we had a night. But do you know where he might be now he disappeared onn them. He was such a figure that way. He has done a beautiful job of writing this about his life, is not the biography of dr. Sacks but it does have a human and humanely informed biography and im sure after the reading part of this hill take questions and that will feed and what should be a lovely conversation. The brighter lights, we are booh tvri here, your friends who are not here will get deceived and get to hear you if you have questions after words. This will be broadcast at an appropriateet time following all of that, hell be in the back to sign copies and his other books that are there as well. We thank you very much foror beg here and now please join in giving a warm welcome 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 the book happened, how them relationship happened, then ill read a particular section. Im on a 20 day book tour and trying to read a different section every night. So a few people from cspan join me on the tour you can have the whole book on audio. But anyway, oliver sacks born in 1933. Part of it was the class of 33, iva theory about people born in 1933. These are people, if you think about it they enter puberty at the very end of the war until the war is ending and they have the hormonesnd kicking in and ty have delusions of grandeur and often wild sexuality and soth forth. They include oliver sacks, philip roth, susan, roman polanski, these are all i can give you a whole bunch more, there is a strange vitality of that particular group rate he was born in 33. He had a complex and difficult life early life, he had been sent both of his parents were doctors when he was seven years old, its a battle britain taken place in all of the children of london and the children of doctors he sent to Country School but in his case it was terrific place which he callse free filled. He sent with his older brother in the treatment they receive there is so horrific that it breaks older brother who is basically a schizophrenic after that. And lived in the attic ofli the house when you would go to london. To olivers Fathers House oliver had a horrific time thereto. Hes always a prodigy. Hes the fourth of four boys, his parents have no idea what to do with him so his mother who is one of the first female surgeons in england she was an ob gyn surgeon and she would bring home when he was eight years old, stillborn fetuses for him to dissect, thats what you do as an 8yearold. And when he was 12, she took into an autopsy of a 12yearold boy who committed suicide. All of thistt is done he hada very intensely close relationship with her. She was always reading them her favorite novelist such as dh lawrence. Humanity by the way is amazing, this is an Orthodox Jewish family where the mother is reading this that makes sense. Anyway he has an extraordinary. In junior high and high school, hehe befriends Jonathan Miller, the great from beyond the fringe, the great doctor, theater director later on. And other people and goes to college and at one point hes home from oxford and his father rounds, the fathers of gp and says oliver you never talk about girls, you never bring home any girls. And oliver says that do not like girls and oliver said do you like boys and he said father emmaat homosexual, please dont tell mother would destroy her. The next morning his mother comes tearing down the stairs and tears into him with what he describes of three hours of an armor coker c. Youre an abomination i wish you never wouldve been bored, lacerating and lacerating and after three hours she fall silent, they dont talk to each other for many weeks and when they resume talking the subject is never raised again in her lifetime, but that voice is deep inside of him. He flees england as soon as he finished his degree as a doctor from oxford and middlesex hospital, a bat out of hell. He comes to california, by the way when he told his father he never been a homosexual, when he said he was a homosexual, he had never had any experiences on that point. Ive always thought in his earlier life he was anything and sexual, when we later altay how we got to know each other, one day we went toat the Natural History museum in kensington in london and we were looking at a diorama of hippopotamuses in the mud and he said this when i was six years old this was the site of my first sexual fantasies. A hippopotamus would make a wonderful bed partner. Dont you think. And then he said hippos in the mud. The mud. [laughter] anyway by this time after he was 21 or 22 he heads to california and has three or four years of a complete out existence, hes in San Francisco and los angeles doing his residencies. Hes in a leather scene and on the fringes of house angels, inhouse angels hes known as doctor squat because hes famous for his squat lifting, hes a california state heavy weight lifting champion, 600 pounds from a squat. He is a fairly open sexually and absolutely floored lee involved in the drug scene. He takes every single drugth tht there is and his slogan is every dose and overdose hes in los angeles, on a friday evening he will take a milkshake of ten times amount of speed that will kill you. But hes incredibly strong and gets on his h motorcycle and frm l. A. He motorcycles to crater lake and back without stopping. Except for gas. When he gets to crater lake he comes back. And at one point he eventually looks himself on the merits is if i keep this up six months ill be dead. He begins to swear off drugs and sex. By the time i met him he had been celibate for 15 years and he would be celibate for 35 years before that ended. Eventually a long story which is where i lose track h here. He tries to be a bench scientist but is so incredibly clumsy he breaks the test tubes and he spent three years developing a collection from earthworms which he then lost in all the notes and experiments were on the back of his motorcycle and fell off on the expressway, they eventually just kicked amount to get out and go. Go see patients were maybe wont cause as much damage and that fact was his liberation. He ends up going to a hospital for a home for the incurable, now or in 1967, 68, 69 and this will be the awakening taking place. L ill talk a little bit more about the awakenings but just to say basically many of you know the story from the movie if nothing else that he at that point00 theres 500 people being warehouse, poorhouse, he spends allpo his time during the yearsf poor houses and state institutions and so forth where 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 the population of 500, 80 of them, the most severely afflicted, the ones who are in complete human statues are somehow different from the others, the alzheimers, the other patients. There been any number of neurologist going through before this none of them have this thought and he goes back to research and they all seem to have succumbed r d different from the others and come to sleepy sickness. It was a horrendous plague that followed the terrible influenza of 1819. The influence in which in many more people died in that influenza around the world that had died in all of world war i. Of those who had survived a few years later particularly younger ones, people in 20s and 30s pretty much from one moment to the next, one day to the next simply came to a halt. They froze. This is a horrendous plague that was talked about aids, they look at 1920s newspapers is terrific. It disappears after seven years, the people catching it, is quickly forgotten. Its a press nobody talks about about all these families have these people in their houses that are keeping alive and a eventually they cant in the homes were being incurable in 30 or 40 years later they were part of a wider population. He has something about the life that he was led and it meant that he was practically sensitive to what a friend called the community of the refuse. People who were the most extremely distant or afflicted. Anyway he spent time with him. I want to speak too much on this this evening but he brings them together and he spends hours and hours with each of them, he also notices that different from the other but he has a more audacity to realize alive inside. Which is a horrifying topic indeed turned out to be the case. And then a drug for parkinson arrives, he reluctantly but decides to do and gives it to the patient and suddenly theyll come alive. In the springlike revival that lasts a few weeks. They go from being frozen years later i talked to one of these people who are still alive in 1982, 12 yearske later and i asked her, do you remember what it was like, she was crumpled over and i think he remembered what when you first came to and she said oh yes. And i said what was it like good been frozen for 30 years she said something i was talking, i said you remember your first words and she said oh yes and i said what were they and she said suddenly i said boo im talking. [laughter] they went from his idol into a period of tribulation where they started having terrible side effects side effects they cannot get it right, it was bedlam for several months and some of them did not make it out, others subsided into accommodation and crumpled existence there was nowhere near as beautiful as the spring but not as bad as the tribulation and better than the previous 30 years. He wrote the book about w that. In 1973 it was published. Its his masterpiece and if youve read olivers and not read that you have aer great spring that had an amazing book. It was virtually completely ignored. It was celebrated by the likes of frank promoted and people like that. But doctors generally did not believe it, was not doubleblind or in quantitative, it was a weird thing of case studies and stories of these people and this is not what neurology was in those days it was very silent quantitative and so forth and rigorous. Many people to the extent the doctors knew of him in either ignore him or disbelieve him. In an hour and 73, by the way years later in 1982 in 1983 when i interviewed the publisher in london First Edition had 1500 copies and they had not yet sold through. 12 years later. After the disappointmentaf of ts olivers something completely dumb. In dismay, his other died shortly after this is what is really in bad shape. He goes on a walk on the mountains of norway by himself without telling anyone. He has a run in with the bull or so he says, his friends think it was a cow. In anyf case he falls off the edge of a cliff and goes falling down at chatham ends up on the bottom having shattered his leg he was incredibly large and incredibly strong and the weight of the body hitting the leg that he lands on, he shatters the leg and is becoming nightfall and is down there for eight hours. At some point people were walking by and located him to get help eventually hands up in the hospital where he had been a medical student in london. Andy has an extreme existentialist experience where the link does not feel like part of his body but its not that hes just not feeling its a foreign alien thing, hed try center out of his bed and goes flying out after. Hes deeply alienated and it goes through this infernal experience and he eventually gets better and things are fine and everything is okay then eyes can write a book about that. He is so unnerved that nobody believes him among the other but he hasnt read this book. He falls into a ten year long Writers Block. In the middle of that, the four years before that i write him a letter. As they say nobody read the book but i went to santa cruz where somebody had read it and i was graduating they threw it into my chest and said you had to read it and when i did, 1979 or so i wrote him a letter inside in the book you call the hospital not carmel. Which is the illusion, st. John of the cross, the dark nightys f the soul, but this does not seem christian mystical amateur and jewish mystical. I get back in eight page written letter from him. My cousin is the Israeli Foreign minister, by the way both of us have the same other first cousin who is al cat, first cousins. In my greatest hero is a soviet neuropsychologist who might be related to the great founder of kabbalah in palestine in the 15th and 16th century. It goes on like that. I finished my first truck and is living in l. A. And its rejected by new york publishers on the ground how can one publish a book about a california artist. Name robert irwin. I sent into the new yorker and i got lucky, they accepted it and i moved to new york. Im looking for 70 else to spend time to write my next book and i decide ill check that robert irwin who ishe not known and is living the life of recluse, hes poor and spends his time in the backwards of poorhouses and institutions and Little Sisters of the poor their homes and state institutions in brock state like that. He is completely stock in the book that is trying to write. At that point was six years in the form his flock takes his jackal mania. Hes writing millions of words but not the right words, he cannot bring it together. In retrospect the four years when i arrive seem to be the hinge years in his life, he easily could got stuck there and we would not have heard more even. Theres an incredible struggle to bring the book to a conclusion among other things. But i spent theou next four yeas i can be sure any given night he would have nobody else who is seen and we begin to dinner to a three times a week and going rounds together which is where i met the patient i described a second ago. We can go to london california and i interviewed many of his friends Jonathan Miller and the poet and things like this at a certain point i got ready now i should write a book. It happened to be where he was getting to the end of his tenure blockage and finally the book was getting ready to be published and i went out for a summer and have thousands of pages of notes in the index is 250 pages long and i started writing it was can be a part new yorker series that we used to have in those days. I was about 75 pages into it and he asked me too stop. They say he cannot deal the sexuality being talked about. At that point in his life he felt that he was homosexual of the blithe of his existence that it was a horrifying fact any help it did not contaminate his signs, he had been celibate and had no bearing at all. I agree that it didnt but you cannot although it did not affected directly by his attitude was filled with things a lot him and empathize with other people in the community they refused and there was no way i can write, if you didnt include that you cannot include the t drug stuff which made it possible for the statue like going on inside. Anyway i agreed ite would write it, and he said after it ended okay what happens. As it happens, couple months before his death he ordered me too go back and read the book. He said that you have to write it and i say one time in the book is like having an aircraft. Going 100 Miles Per Hour and being told to stop on a dime and third years later go back in the book that has a long is not a biography and it makes no pretense of being a biography. It has a long intervention in the meat of the book is my account of those four years when he was like during the four years. During what i see the years where i was a beanpole. He is much different than is going to be later on, he will by then then the. Finally get the book out and immediately publish this all the stuff that was locked out, hes an International Bestseller and he becomes a pleasing different world. He becomes a teddy bear that we knowingly left. Before that he was quite scattered. This is an account of those years. I thought, keeping the Something Different each time, that i would read 45 pages from the. Worries getting to the end of the writing. Hes written so many different versions, this book is just trying to get to finishing, at this point that is finally on the verge of finishingwe it. For now in 1983. October 27, he is reading and says i was utterly engrossed that it was like reading thewa Natural History of some alien species beautifully described, coherent, wondrous and terrible and almost in an epiphany when i realizes my people, us. He was t