On the other hand, I have to pay a price for this exemption from conflict and turmoil. I hardly exist, now, apart from my work. From getting up at 4:30 each morning to write, to my exhausted sleep—which is usually filled with dreams of Parkinsonism and the teeming theories of the moment—I have little time to myself, and almost none for human relationships or ordinary pleasures. I have become almost a monk in my devotion to work, and in my sense of a huge, privileged task which I must work at and finish. In my sense of being, as it were, dedicated to a supra-personal task (or mission), I can escape from the suffocating confines of other desires and guilts, which (as you know, and as you experience in yourself) are almost insane in intensity. In a paradoxical way, my existence has become tolerable and pleasant by having become, in a sense, impersonal or suprapersonal. There is much less fear, less craving, less blaming, less claiming, and all that. Monk-like, the Spinoza of 78th St. (Spinoza has become my idol, my ideal of calm and noble self-sufficiency), I write and think day and night, and when I am finished, will feel that my life has not been wasted, and that my thoughts and personality (such as they are) will not die with my own physical death. And this is a very comforting feeling, which makes my current back-breaking labours tolerable.

  I confess I am lonely, and have no shoulders to weep on, no breasts to fall asleep on, and all that; and that I am neglecting my poor body—overeating, depriving it of sleep and exercise—but all this, perhaps, is the price one pays for too complete a sublimation. Perhaps I can achieve a more reasonable balance with time. I confess, too, that I still nourish nostalgic dreams and visions of California, of trips—physical and psychical—and doubtless I shall do to the end of my days. But I feel that my present journey, although it is accomplished mostly at the typewriter, can adequately compensate me for all others.

  So, you see what a strange fate has befallen your old friend! The passion for truth has driven all other passions out of my life. But I promise myself, next summer, if my labours are over, to go away somewhere for six months—feeling, for the first time in my life, entitled to go wherever and do whatever I want.

  To Mike Warvarovsky

  January 19, 1970

  234 East 78th St., New York

  Dear Mike,

  The arrival of your card this evening, and your New Year’s greetings, bring me a sense of welcome from afar, and reminds me of my dereliction in our correspondence. […]

  The Californian Urge I empathize with, and submitted to a short time back, when I impulsively flew there for the Christmas–New Year week. I had a most beautiful ten days, molten with nostalgia, with the sense of Return and Re-Union, etc. Loved people, loved places—a tremendous sense of closeness, of immediacy, the sudden cracking-open of the hard, protective, estranging schizoid husk which I have built for myself in New York: I found myself embarrassingly close to tears for much of the time, but they were tears of joy, sorrow, memory, closeness, affection, not the hateful hard tears of rage and spite which I sometimes shed in New York. The joy of driving slowly up the Coast: of seeing a vast sun sinking into the ocean at Piedras Blancas, the golden rushes of Lucia, the cypresses at Carmel tormented into shapes of anguish and beseechment: everything seemed steeped in gold-and-greenness, outside time, eternal, almost allegorical. And lovely, at a human level, to meet again with Dave Sheppard, Frenchie (who hugged me when I came into the bar where he was drinking), and Peanuts, and Bill Tunberg.[*18] I have felt utterly lonely in New York, and the sudden feeling of friendship almost overwhelmed me when I went out again to the West Coast. And not least, an entirely unsolicited and very exciting job offer, which I must think very seriously about. What do I have to think about? I loathe New York, I always have. But, but—my analyst is here, and he has saved my life many times, and I suppose is felt as the only possible saviour of my soul. But I hate my dependence upon him, upon anyone or anything: and yet my feelings of dependence can become limitless: I depend on some people and things to give me my very sense of existence. And I hate to leave my patients—some of them, at least, whom I love, from whom I draw nourishment, to whom I give nourishment, and whom I would like to put on a big Flying Fortress, a Parkinsonian jumbo-jet, and whisk with me to California. I am very uncertain of my plans for the moment.

  I am afraid that my creativity, like most of the good things in life, and the good loving mood, has been occluded for the last four months, roughly: I say occluded, for as soon as the prevailing mood of hate and spite and guilt etc. is drawn aside, it shines as brightly as ever. I so hate myself, I have to ration the good things to an absolute minimum. And I need it so much, to combat the dangerous feelings of worthlessness and folly which take hold of me, and command me to destroy myself from time to time. Never have I felt such stubborn resistance to what is best in me, and this reflects the felt danger and impermissibility of the triumph which is almost in my hands. Every rush of creative thinking is followed by a demoniacal rebound, a monstrous horde of punitive injunctions and (so cunningly is fatality disguised) masochistic temptations. I thought I was going to lose my hands over Christmas: I took a biggish overdose of ergot,[*19] and almost vasoconstricted my fingers (to say nothing of my toes, nose, ears, chin, and penis) into gangrene. Eugh! I can hardly bear to think about it, and the very thought makes me nurse my fingers (still pale, cool, swollen, analgesic) and think how near they came to mortification. Whether or not Freud was right in postulating a basic Mortido[*20] in everyone, I assuredly have my fill of it (and so, probably much more than I, have you).

  Having ruined my peripheral circulation, I think I must now make a virtue of necessity, and give up all the dear poisons I have been hooked on these past six years—nicotine, amphetamines, mescaline, cocaine, etc. —all of them, the whole bloody lot, because they’re all vasoconstrictors. I cannot take 1 mg. of speed[*21] without inducing an intense spasm in my finger arteries. So I have to be good from now on. I wonder what will fill the moral vacuum left by drugs? And also the moral and emotional vacuum left by a sort of perverse love-affair, never consummated, which has chained me in masochistic bondage for ten years?[*22] I think it’ll have to be God. (“The best cure for dipsomania is religiomania.”)[*23] Which reminds me that I met Howard Heidtmann[*24] (now Bhrendan Christenson!), who has undergone a profound, and probably permanent, conversion: he is quite insane I suppose (I take all Faith to be delusional wish-fulfillment) and also obviously redeemed: loving and gentle where he used to be hateful and violent, innocent and forgiven where he was consumed with guilt and reproach, etc. The Sin against the Holy Ghost (which is the inadmissible desire to be fucked) at once gratified and forgiven in its ultimate sublimation: becoming the beloved, the “vessel” of the Lord, the soul, passive and feminine, swooning in the more-than-carnal, redemptive embrace of its Heavenly Father. I was greatly reminded of Schreber’s Memoirs,[*25] which you must read. So let’s all get God, man!—the ultimate trip for all of us wicked sinful paranoids.

  And on this note, dear Michael, I conclude, and wish you all you wish yourself for the New Year.

  yrs,

  Oliver

  To Michael Sacks[*26]

  Brother

  February 7, 1970

  234 East 78th St., New York

  Dear Michael,

  I was very happy to receive your short note of January 4, and have been guilty and angry at myself for not having made any reply to it in the month since its arrival. For reply it certainly requested, despite its appearance of a bald statement of fact. […] My reactions (like your own, though less so) are contradictory, and this has made the writing of a return-letter difficult.

  One general thing is quite clear, and a requisite for your survival (as a person). You must have some third mode of existence, some middle-ground, between living at Hospital (which, with the exhaustion of its initial promise, is barely tolerable for you) and living at home (which is less tolerable): you must have some middle-ground between feelings of doom (yourself the victim, the persecuted, the cross-bearer) and phantasies of redemption (yourself the messenger, the chosen, the evangel and bearer of redemption). Above all, you must secure some release from your conscience, which is the most merciless I have ever known: like Kafka, you labour constantly under a sense of infinite guilt. You can find nothing right or loveable about yourself, and with this nothing forgiveable in those around you. One’s moral space, so to speak, can be filled with accusation, and leave no room for reality.

  I know, I spend a great deal of my life in just this paranoid posture, filled with feelings of hate, vengeance, abjection, hopelessness. And I too (though obviously much less than yourself) regard every moment as a moment of crisis, full of threat and promise, full of destructive and redemptive potential.

  You pretend, constantly, that you have no “savvy”: untrue, absolutely untrue. You have lots of savvy, lots of common sense and just judgement of people and situations: but you will hardly permit yourself to believe this, or use it. You imagine, again, that you produce only feelings of revulsion and contempt in others: untrue, utterly untrue again, you have a very real capacity to inspire affection and esteem in others, but this too you decline to believe.

  I have just heard (in a letter from Ma and Pa) that you have secured a job in the West End, partly inside and partly outside. I am very glad to hear this. Please let me know more of it.

  Besides a job you need (not economically, but for your very sense of existence, and for the possibility of release from the knots of hate and spite which bind you, and our parents, at Mapesbury) a place of your own—a hostel, a little furnished room, something you can get away to, someplace where you can put a few belongings of your own, and establish some autonomy. There is no human being, there is no animal, which does not need some territory it can feel as its own: and you are no exception. At Mapesbury you are engulfed, swallowed whole, nullified, reduced to a sort of enraged slavery and dependence, and this is death for you. […]

  You must move out of the world of obligation, as much as you can, for obligation is bondage, and splices you to attitudes of compliance and defiance. And all obligation is hateful.

  As opposed to devotion, which is an expression of love. I won’t nag you to start psychotherapy or anything: it may well be pointless at this stage, and God knows you have had enough negative experiences of [psychiatric treatment]. What you do need (and what I find myself moving towards) is a sort of religion—and here I mean religion not merely as a set of ceremonials but as an impregnable basis of loving and devoted feeling. For there is nothing in the world which makes one feel really good other than the feeling of fulfilling some task (mission, or whatever) towards others.

  I had meant to send you, and you should read, the most beautiful book in the world (to my mind): Spinoza’s Ethics, which after a fantastic (and I think, absolutely true) analysis of the nature of all human feelings, moves on towards a sort of transcendent psychology, theology, the nature of true acquiescence and freedom, and what he calls the intellectual love of God. It is a marvellous book, the nearest I have to a bible.

  Anyhow, I have said much too much, and sounded pompous and patronizing, which I was afraid I would.

  Do drop me a line, when you feel like it, and tell me how things are going with you.

  Love,

  Oliver

  To Jonathan Miller

  [ca. April 1970]

  2512 Bronx Park East, Bronx, NY[*27]

  Dear Jonathan,

  Lovely to get your letter yesterday. Your letters are indeed rare, but most prized. […]

  There is obviously so much to do here, with my present patients. In March I wrote four long letters and four articles which I sent to the Lancet: they accepted my letters (I enclose copies of two) but felt that the articles would overload them. Now when I tot things up, I realize that first I have another dozen articles to write, and […] then I must get on with my next subject (I do one subject at a time, and do it definitively), which is “dementia” (which I will demonstrate and construct in terms of hierarchical cortical functions and intellectual structures, Luria[*28] and Piaget in reverse), and then “schizophrenia.” So I see years of work stretching ahead, which gives me a good privileged feeling (the “task,” the “mission,” etc.) but also a feeling of being walled-in, and having to shelve the wild wanderings and wanderlusts and extravagances of youth, neurosis, drugs, etc. But it is not a bad bargain. Thank God I have a remarkable ability to sublimate and to become dedicated to things, otherwise I would end up catatonic, like my brother in Bedlam.

  Physically life has become a good deal better, now that I have a car (a 1967 Rover) and a pleasant apartment. The hospital is renting me this for a fairly token sum. I have six rooms (which is large for NY) which occupy the ground-floor of an oldish house, with a garage and basement, and also a little garden fore-and-aft thrown in. […] I hope you will consider staying over for a day or two when you next come to NY.

  Naturally (or naturally enough with my degree of ambivalence) I also feel aghast at the thought of such comfort and security etc. and feel that a) I will be punished for it, b) that it will suddenly be taken away, and c) that it will cause an immediate stultification, petrification, mummification, (? lunefaction), for I have adopted the working hypothesis that any productivity I have is proportional to, and dependent on, my insecurity and misery, and is, so to speak, permitted by this. I think, however, that the opposite will turn out to be the case, and that a reasonable degree of inner and outer comfort and security will make a steady productivity easier, and release me from the former necessities of drugs, manias, self-indulgent depression, sudden flights to and from (the ideal, the intolerable) etc. Essentially because it becomes easier for me to detach the products of my imagination from my own wishes and fears, which liberates the imagination on the one hand, and also liberates one from one’s personal phantoms and unconscious imaginings. You, obviously, have had a liberated imagination for many years, but with me it is fairly recent.

  Though I do ask myself: liberated for what? Almost every night, if not several times a night, I dream about excitation, and inhibition, and ultraparadoxical states, and points of “breakthrough” (you will see I have gone very Pavlovian lately). One can get so consumed by one’s work, that there is precious little left over. And I begin to wonder whether I am becoming inattentive to the phenomenal world, its beauties as well as its horrors, through inner concentration: so that at times I feel (I will not tell you whom I am paraphrasing)[*29] that I am becoming neither more nor less than a very good machine for deriving general laws from large bodies of data. I think you are more kaleidoscopic than I am: my metier seems to be a sort of concentration, a cohabitation with my data.

  And the resistance one must fight to find new ideas! So much emotion, so much attachment, goes with the old. And one feels like a murderer when one must smash down one set of ideas to make room for a new set. The real work is this smashing down. Once one does this, the very questions evaporate: you see what is true facing you, no longer obscured, and now it is obvious, really tautologous. And so there is a sense of let-down. And an intense sense of surprise that other people bridle at what one has said, because one forgets all of their resistances. […] I used to think it either a false modesty, or a concealed grandiosity, when Locke wrote: “it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge,” but now I think it was an exact and just estimate of his role. And I want no other role myself.

  This letter has blathered on much too much.

  Write again soon.

  My love to the family—I will hope to see you all in August.

  Yrs,

  Oliver

  To Elsie and Samuel Sacks

  May 6, 1970

  2512 Bronx Park East, Bronx, NY

  Dear Ma and Pa,

  This letter will arrive, I imagine, about the time you return from Israel. I hope you had a good, relaxed time there: what is the general atmosphere like? From the outside, of course, the whole Middle East seems to be boiling in a particularly dangerous way, or about to blow up. Indeed the whole world seems that way at the moment—tensions are extremely high here, following the invasion of Cambodia and the brutal shooting of those students in Ohio. Groups of people, complete strangers, stop and talk to each other in the street; most of the colleges throughout the States are putting on strikes or boycotts; there is a very fearful, ominous atmosphere, something like that in the first days of 1939, I imagine.

  It seems almost improper to pursue one’s personal life, when everything around one is so agog. If March was a lovely calm productive month for me (and I realize, looking through my papers, that I wrote more than a thousand pages during March, although only a fraction was submitted for publication: the Lancet, by the way, have sent me the proofs of the four long letters I sent them, and these will be appearing in the next few issues), April was one of flux and turmoil, associated especially with moving house, or rather with setting up a household of my own. The bustle has been quite a pleasant one in many ways, although the consumption of time, labour, money etc. has been far greater than I would have imagined. In a sense I have had to start from scratch, for my life in New York has really been a sort of living-out-of-a-suitcase existence in furnished rooms hitherto, whereas now I have a “home” of sorts, or so I must regard it. And so I do regard it, with all the concomitant feelings of security and alarm which anything permanent or permanent-seeming always gives me. […]