vanityfair.com: Oliver Sacks, Before the Neurologist’s Cancer and New York Times Op-Ed #
lawrence weschler über oliver sacks. anlässlich der in kürze veröffentlichten autobiografie von oliver sacks, veröffentlicht lawrence weschler auch ein paar notizen seiner frühen gespräche mit ihm:
He respects facts, he tells me, and he has a scientist’s passion for precision. But facts, he insists, must be embedded in stories. Stories—people’s stories—are what really have him hooked.
Sacks has no romantic love of the irrational, nor does he worship the rational. He speaks of their inter-penetration, as of a garden—delirium, bounded and tamed back just enough to allow for humane living. The irrational needs to be mastered into personality. But at the same time, those who have been visited by these irrational firestorms, and surmounted them, are somehow deeper human beings, more profound persons, for the experience.
“Part of this time I spent in California, doing my residency at U.C.L.A. I lived on Venice Beach, disguised to myself as a muscle builder at the open-air jungle gym. I was quite suicidal: I took every drug, my only principle being 'Every dose an overdose.’ I used to race motorcycles in the Santa Monica Mountains. Apparently I created something of a ruckus at the U.C.L.A. hospital: I would take some of the patients, the M.S. victims and the paraplegics who hadn’t moved in years—they’d ask me and I’d take them out, strapped to my back, motorcycling in the mountains.
Olga, who has Parkinson’s, gets wheeled in. Oliver asks her to stand up, and she has a terrible time, struggling to rise up from her wheelchair—but then Oliver has her sit down, and he holds out two hands, a single extended finger protruding from each, and she clutches the fingers and gets up effortlessly. “See: you share your action with them,” he comments to me.
als ich sacks bücher zum ersten mal las, waren sie eine offenbarung. eine offenbarung wie man menschen betrachten und verstehen kann und was man alles über menschen verstehen kann, wenn man empathie, verständnis und zuneigung zu ihnen hat.
dieser artikel von lawrence weschler ist wie alles von und über oliver sacks sehr lesenswert.