Such reservations as I have are relatively minor—relative, that is, to the salient fact of your creative interest in Awakenings. One fears vulgarization, sensationalism, distortion, etc.—always; but it was very clear from meeting you that your own integrity and sensibility, should you embark on the matter, would prevent any gross distortions of this sort. Of course, as you were the first to say, others (directors, etc.) might overrule you.

  There are any number of “authentic” renderings—all of which could present an essential “truth” (even if they departed rather widely from “the facts”). After ruminating on the matter for some weeks since we met, I doubt if I am as “obsessed” or as vulnerable, or as impossibly demanding—critical, as, perhaps, seemed the case at first. If things should work out well, it would be a delight for us all; if they don’t, I doubt if much harm could be done. So, for myself, at this juncture, I want to say that I am much more grateful than fearful; I feel open—and wonder if this is the case with you too? […] How are you both? How is LA? Is the end of the strike[*14] in sight? Please write or phone.

  To Mother Genevieve

  Little Sisters of the Poor

  November 2, 1981

  119 Horton St., City Island, NY

  Dear Mother Genevieve,

  I am so sorry I missed you (Sister Winifred looked after me very kindly)—I thought I would drive down by little backroads—and I got well and truly lost on them, so that my journey (though beautiful) lasted seven hours instead of three!

  I found it quite heartbreaking to see poor Sr. Geraldine,[*15] so damaged, yet so gallantly herself; I thought I would burst into tears when I saw her, and I wanted to hug her when I left. I disallowed myself—but I am sure she felt my feelings. She showed such concern for others, and the Little Sisters—asked me keenly about Jeanne Jugan Residence in the Bronx, and was delighted when I said that it was finally finding itself, and becoming a real Home. She showed no self pity, or resentment, or protest—not, at least, at the deepest level; but an acceptance (not without humour) of her hard fate.

  Sr. Mary Geraldine had said to me (this was ten days earlier) that she could or would not talk, and she seemed “withdrawn and unresponsive”—presumably depressed. This, then, was what I expected. The reality I found was utterly different: she was vividly responsive, and luminously herself—and I could not help feeling that the “unresponsiveness” etc. of the preceding week(s) must have been partly organic, a direct consequence of thalamic and hypothalamic depression, and, as such, lifted with the use of steroids.

  This can only be temporary in the face of this relentlessly-advancing pathology—I think one must thank Medicine (and God) that this final remission has been granted to her; and that her mother (and all of you) will find her so alive, and real, and present, in order to make her last peace and farewells.

  I had the sense, as I think she had, of a last (and valedictory) reprieve: a last deep and grateful drinking-in of the world, and all of the goodness and beauties of life, before the final taking-away. She was so gracious, so grateful, for everything when I saw her: I thought of the last line of Auden’s last poem, “Let your last thinks all be thanks.”[*16] It seemed to me that this was precisely her mood—a final and gentle and comprehensive Thanksgiving—and, as such, the only mood, the right mood, in which to approach Death. Doubtless there are also inner protests and angers and fears—but at the deepest level, there was a profound calm. It is a mercy that she is not suffering much physical pain—nor, I think, will she; but as the tumor grows, and the steroids fail to hold, there will be a gradual and painless easing-away.

  I cannot judge (nor is it my place to) how many weeks or months she has left; but clearly she is dying—and, as clearly, with great grace.

  If I can switch from sadness to gladness. On my last day in England, this summer, I went to Jonathan Cole’s wedding, in a tiny country church. It was a wonderful ceremony, and Eternity was there. He (they) looked wonderfully happy—there was a palpable sense of a Blessing upon them, blessing descending with the September sunlight, raying in and enfolding them through the ancient church windows. Jonathan asked specially to be remembered to you, and I take the liberty of enclosing the prayer-and-hymn sheet they had in the church.

  I hope you are well, and in good spirits, Mother; and that I may be able to see you when I come to Philadelphia again soon.

  Yours sincerely,

  Oliver Sacks

  To Harold Pinter[*17]

  Playwright

  March 9, 1982

  119 Horton St., City Island

  Dear Mr. Pinter,

  I have received A KIND OF ALASKA, and read it with very great pleasure. I was rapt, completely. You have entered the world of AWAKENINGS, and of Rose R. in particular, with uncanny success—or, rather, you have reconceived it in your own unique way, but a way which is utterly faithful to the themes and spirit of AWAKENINGS. It is absolutely authentic, and marvellously real—and if Rose R. were still alive (she died two years ago) she would be deeply moved and exclaim wonderingly “Yes, that’s me! That’s how it was…” There is an extraordinary sort of sympathy or resonance between the two works—I feel your work as a great compliment (and also complement) to my own, a wonderful transformation of it, and I am delighted you did it. What do you have in mind for it now?

  AWAKENINGS itself achieved a lot of good notice when it came out in 1973, and still, I think, attracts attention. It was republished, enlarged, in both the States and the U.K., in 1976, and is to come out in a rather radically revised edition this coming autumn or winter. In this new edition I continue the story of these extraordinary patients, whom I have now known, and loved, and worked with for sixteen years. In my “follow-up” of Rose I wrote “…we never saw anything like the events of 1969 again…She had been inconceivably, inaccessibly and incommunicably ill since…1926.” I often used to sit with her, for hours at a time, trying to fathom what sort of state she was in, where she was; and I think you have divined it in A KIND OF ALASKA.

  I hope we can discuss further the other points you raise in your letter, and I will look forward to hearing from you. I am sorry the original package went astray—it must have been distressing to have two months without word—but now you have my right address (and telephone number) for further communications.

  Yours sincerely,

  Oliver Sacks

  To Thom Gunn[*18]

  April 1, 1982

  119 Horton St., City Island, NY

  Dear Thom,

  I am so sorry, I only just received your letter—when I moved here (a little nautical house near the water) 18 months ago, I didn’t realize that the P.O. forwarded letters for a year only—I was (but this is better than not getting them at all) just sent a batch of letters, including yours, by my former landlords, who found them accumulated on their return from wintering in Florida. […]

  Yes, it does seem a long time since our ferry-ride to Staten Island.

  I live—alone, as always (but “nunquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset”)[*19]—in a nice old frame house, with lots of books and a piano to keep me company. But I am not misanthropic or isolated, even if I am solitary, and love entertaining my friends in the house—especially in the garden or verandah.[*20] I also have no money—I will have to borrow for Tax Day—but have found a sort of equanimity—though I desperately wish for more leisure.

  I have just made a third—probably final—revision of Awakenings, for my poor patients are vanishing fast; I have worked with them, lived with them, loved them, for sixteen years—a third of my life, which is now coming to its end. My final revision is a sort of Thanksgiving and Farewell. I have a funny sort of feeling that my (22 year long) “American Adventure” is drawing to a close—and am not quite sure what the future holds.

  I have explored depths, heights and depths, I could not have imagined even five years ago; but all this has been in a strange sort of secrecy and silence—I have not been exactly “blocked,” but mute (or shut-up) in some sort of way for—oh dear! nine years now…But, liberatingly, I have just written an explosion of “Essays” (I don’t know what to call them—maybe “Meditations”), and finally feel a very overdue book quickening inside me (it will be called Quickening(s)[*21]—and am starting to reach for the typewriter, instead of my endless, secret “Notebooks”—that endless Journal (?to an ideal friend) which has absorbed a million words a year since Awakenings.

  I do congratulate you on your magnificent “Collected” Poems—you bring a whole life into poetic focus; and would love to receive your new poems in the summer. […]

  Best,

  Oliver

  To Edwyn Silberling

  Attorney

  April 28, 1982

  119 Horton St., City Island, NY

  Dear Edwyn:

  […] I received this[*22] today, which is identical with the form-letter of three-and-a-half months ago. If an organism functioned like Medicaid it would not survive a day! What sort of headless, mindless Thing is this which has no internal communication, no organization, no unity-of-action whatever? No wonder most of my colleagues refuse to see Medicaid patients—the patients themselves are made to suffer from the defects of the System. Can you do something about this, please? Is there no-one who runs the show? Perhaps it is as decapitate as it appears. […]

  Incidentally—I hear this from many colleagues—the incidence of (clerical/computer) errors in their own Remittance-Statements and processing of claims has now risen from its previous 25–30% to about 70%. Two thirds of everything they do is wrong—this must be some sort of record!

  I hope you are keeping well and enjoying the Spring.

  Yours sincerely,

  Oliver

  To Lawrence Weschler[*23]

  Writer

  August 18, 1982

  119 Horton St., City Island, NY

  Dear Ren,

  I was delighted that you were able to come out to the Island today, and, as always, enjoyed the visit hugely. Alas! (as I feared) I excruciated my back with the rowing, for the third time in two weeks—it was already half “out” in the morning. I had difficulty bending down to put on my shoes, and at such times I have to be especially careful. […] I probably shouldn’t write now, because I am half-stoned (on some percodan), which makes the pain more bearable, but makes me loose and effusive.

  But there was a particular point you raised. […] I spoke of my early scientific passion, and its disappearance aet[*24] 14–5. You asked why. I said, inadequately, that I thought it due to the rise of sexual and neurotic distraughtness. I think this is a very partial truth (if, indeed, a truth at all).

  In early childhood, aet 3–5, I certainly had some illuminations and raptures of a “scientific” or “cosmic” type—the clearest I recollect being connected with sunflowers and primes (finding their whorls were derivatives of these, and getting an overwhelmed sense, therefore, of the mathematical order and beauty of the world). In the years of intense misery during my Evacuation (aet 6–9½) I ceased to have such experiences. And then, on my return to London, aet 10–10½, I had them again—indeed they dominated my life, they saved my life (I felt then, and still feel) in these years. Why then did they go away?

  I think the reason may be altogether more “human,” and less pathological, and to do with the fundamentally different character of the “scientific” and the personal. I think I managed to exclude the personal—personal feeling, personal involvement, etc—during these charmed years of scientific absorption—but if I excluded its anguishes, I excluded its warmth as well. There is, indeed, a scientific love, but it is pure, cold, austere, impersonal—it can be radiant, radiant, as dazzling as the sun, but it is not warm, not warm in the least. I had illumination, I had light, but very little warmth—and, in the nature of things, or the nature of my nature, this could not last. I think it was not neurosis or sexuality as such, but the need for warmth, for “life,” which broke my absorption.

  But is this any answer? Why (you will say) could one not have both? Are they not, finally, complementary, to be joined? Why an “either/or,” and not a rich both?

  Do you know Darwin’s “Biography of an Infant”—his observations on his first-born son, George, in the first months of his life (c 1840)? What is so marvellous—and so natural (and so, so, rare)—about these is that they do, most perfectly, combine the scientific and the personal, scientific detachment and fatherly love are perfectly fused. Much later, this is what Darwin himself had to say, in a passage of great candour and pathos:

  In one respect…my mind has changed during the last 20 or 30 years…Formerly, pictures gave me considerable, and music very intense delight. But now…I have almost lost my taste for pictures or music…My mind seems to have become a sort of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact…The loss of these tastes, this curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes, is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect…by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

  * * *

  —

  And yet, one would say, are not all Darwin’s observations drenched in love (and humour)—right to the end? Whether he describes orchids, or earthworms, he does so with love; there is always the love of phenomena, the love of Nature, what Spinoza (and perhaps Einstein) would call “the intellectual love of God.”

  The question is: whether this love—the love of phenomena (Einstein speaks here of “einfuhlung”), the love of order, the love of nature, amor intellectus Dei—whether these forms of intellectual love can, in fact, “go” with a more personal sort of love, or whether they are, in some sense, incompatible, even hostile? […]

  To Benedict Nightingale

  Drama Critic, The New Statesman

  October 23, 1982

  119 Horton St., City Island, NY

  Dear Mr. Nightingale,

  I want to express my appreciation for your penetrating review in the Statesman, and especially your words about Awakenings.

  I was intensely surprised myself when, a few months ago, the post brought me A Kind of Alaska, with a lovely letter from Pinter about how he had read Awakenings many years ago; how it had “suggested a world” to him, which then sunk from consciousness; and how, last summer, he had woken with an image of the woman lying in bed, and the first words of the play in his mind, and this strange “world,” re-erupting, became the play in a few days.

  Like you I wondered: Why dig up this bizarre case-history from the archive (though, of course, having lived and worked with these patients for sixteen years now, they are living realities to me, not bizarre histories in an archive)? But as I read the play I had an extraordinary sense of consonance and rightness—he had, as he hoped, entered this strange world, and in a way which seemed to me uncanny, almost clairvoyant. I felt he had been with me, known my thoughts and feelings, known the patient, etc. When I showed the play to a colleague of mine who had known Sylvie (“Rose R.”) intimately, she said, “He has caught Sylvie’s essence. It is not like ‘Pinter,’ it is just like the truth”—a wonderful tribute to the essential truth, the transparency, of Pinter’s art (I wish I had quoted this to him when I met him last week).

  I had long feared Awakenings was forgotten, and had become no more than an “archive,” and I was overjoyed, of course, that Pinter had seen it, remembered it, incubated it, and, finally, reconceived it in his own unique way. And, as you say, it is perhaps, finally, not so surprising, since Pinter is intensely concerned with the depths, the submerged nine-tenths—and so am I. My work always seems to bring me to the intersection of fact and fable, and to provide me with metaphors or parables of being human—extreme metaphors, as you say, or (perhaps more accurately), metaphors of human beings in extremity. All my patients (in the “locked ward,” the tragic underworld I work in)—and not just the postencephalitic ones—have extraordinary stories to tell and be told—and I think their stories are relevant to more ordinary and universal feelings and situations. I do, in this sense, think of myself as a sort of neurological novelist—though, alas! one who has published all too little. But the powers of a Dramatist are much finer and rarer—“Alaska” (and Judi Dench)[*25] convey the essence with incomparable economy: and make it real, which words alone cannot do.

  Thank you, again, for remembering Awakenings—I have just finished the proofs of a new edition which carries my patients’ stories up to the present, and will take the liberty of sending you a copy when it comes out in the Spring. (By the way, I am English, and not American, though I live and work in the States.)

  To F. Robert Rodman

  November 13, 1982

  119 Horton St., City Island, NY

  Dear Bob,

  A letter—why not? The rumble of train wheels, the passing scenery, the sense of a Journey—I am on my way—to Boston. […] Eric[*26] has a bookfair in Boston this weekend—somehow he gives me “permission” to travel. […]

  And, in general, these last days, I have had a sense of release—after the endless (the 8 yr.) imprisonment of “The Leg.” My editor likes what he can read[*27]—and, whatever revisions I may (have to/want to) make, in some sense the bloody thing is over. I feel no joy (as after Migraine)—just a great sense of release, and the eager-fearful, alive question of “What now? What next?” (There has been no “Next” for the longest time, for the Leg book obstructed everything else). […]