5 TILF Oliver Sacks on PBS

 

American Masters on PBS just broadcast "Oliver Sacks: His Own Life." 

1) The ending of his life is remarkable.  I recall reading the last essays he wrote in the NYT and being overcome by emotion.  Here was an amazing amount of composure as he faced a short deadline for his life.  

I  cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

2) The documentary recounts how his life became full during his last four years.  After decades of celibacy (35 years if I recall), he fell in love with Bill.  He had a partner, a lover, a companion.

3) His writing and thinking.  He was so curious and omnivorous.  He wrote and thought about everything.  His writing was description and exploration.  In a way, his writing was the way that he made his way through the world.

“We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection.” 

4) His empathy.  A continuing thread through the documentary was his remarkable ability to empathize with patients.  There are so many clips of Oliver holds a hand of a profoundly afflicted patient, with getting in close space with young people or tourrette's patients (even getting manhandled).  His medical practice involved sharing physical space with patients, rather than pronouncing a diagnosing.  One tourette's patient talks about how Oliver made him feel more than regular, having and excess of humanness, rather than a lack of one.  Many of the people interviewed talking about how he wanted to be "in the skin of" patients, to see the world as they saw it.  And describing it rather than pronouncing judgment on it.  

5) "How do you be?" Related to #4, one person interviewed talked about how Sacks' core medical question was "how are you?" not referring to a simple greeting, but to "how do you be?"