The Tortoise and the Hare Entry No. 13

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
By Oliver Sacks

I decided not to write about everything I read. Well, this book brought my return.

There’s nothing quite like illness that can teach you about life. If it were comedy, it’d be slapstick comedy - with a blatantness that one can’t overlook.  What were those years of philosophy class for, discovering nuance as if with a fine-toothed comb, when we could learn about life in this startling way? I felt I was reading something so consequential.

I admit I picked up the book because I wanted to meet illness devoid of the emotional. I wanted something clinical. But I got more than what I bargained for. It is perhaps the most philosophical book I’ve ever read. How would the narrative of our lives look? Like a musical score or schemata? There is an earnest curiosity, empathy, intelligence, and stunning probity in Sacks that I’ve never seen before. It is easy to be stunned by deficit or excess, but I guess there is life even in what we see as non-life. This book taught me that.

There is a scene in the book that stuck with me. Dr. Sacks thought his patient was steadily recovering in a nurturing hospital after a life of muteness and isolation in a cellar. But he found him one day, rocking himself, almost primitively.  At that moment, he realised that “there was no simple “awakening” for him, but a path fraught with danger, double jeopardy, terrifying as well as exciting – because he had come to love his prison bars.” I understood Dr. Sack’s position, but I also understood his patient’s, gravely.

Learning about the brain is quite simply like learning about God. Perhaps the brain’s capacity is so great that we cannot contain it and be whole.

A tortoise read. Chapters are short. Read only a chapter a day.