Awakenings
by Oliver Sacks

It's a terrible title, I know, I know, redolent of New Age chanting-monk-with- nature-sounds cds and Christian pamphlets with radiant sunrises, but how could he have known that back in 1972? And he says he got it from Ibsen, from "When We Dead Awaken", and there's no flies on Ibsen, right? None that I can see. So forgive him. And forgive that the movie based on the book stars (I think) Robin Williams (shudder). Dig up everything there is that you don't like about Oliver Sacks and forgive it all.

Forgive him my failure to read "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" when I was fifteen and saw it on the featured shelf at the public library. Forgive him the result of that omission - I dropped all my science classes as soon as I was able, unwittingly rendering myself a neurologist manque for the rest of my days. And forgive him the years of tedious neurological fantasies he has inspired in me - maybe I have a mild case of Asperger's Syndrome? Autism? Tourette's? Maybe I'll develop a rare neurochemical disorder that will allow me to experience the fabulous worlds he describes in his case studies first-hand? (Touch wood, I know, be careful what you wish for).

Forgive him all of this, and his occasional bursts of smug clinicism - he tries hard to keep them down, but he is, after all, still a doctor - and anything else that bothers you about him, because who else is going to publish things like the following footnote for us to read?

"I would often ask Miss R what she was thinking about.
'Nothing, just nothing," she would say.
'But how can you possibly be thinking of nothing?'
'It's dead easy, once you know how.'
'How exactly do you think about nothing?'
'One way is to think about the same thing again and again. Like 2=2=2=2; or, I am what I am what I am what I am...It's the same thing with my posture. My posture continually leads to itself. Whatever I do or whatever I think leads deeper and deeper into itself... And then there are maps.'
'Maps? What do you mean?'
'Everything I do is a map of itself, everything I do is a part of itself. Every part leads into itself... I've got a thought in my mind, and then I see something in it, like a dot on the skyline. It comes nearer and nearer, and then I see what it is - it's just the same thought I was thinking before. And then I see another dot, and another, and so on...Or I think of a map; then a map of that map; then a map of that map of that map, and each map perfect, though smaller and smaller... Worlds within worlds within worlds within worlds...Once I get going I can't possibly stop. It's like being caught between mirrors, or echoes, or something. Or being caught on a merry-go-round which won't come to a stop.'
Sometimes, Miss R. told me, she would feel compelled to circumscribe the sides of a mental quadrangle, to seven notes of an endlessly-reiterated Verdi aria: 'Tum -ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum,' a forced mental perambulation which might go on for hours or days. And at other times she would be forced to 'travel', mentally, through an endless 3-D tunnel of intersecting lines, the end of the tunnel rushing towards her but never reached.
'And do you have any other ways of thinking about nothing, Rosie?'
'Oh yes!' The dots and maps are positive nothings, but I also think of negative nothings.'
'And what are those like?'
'That's impossible to say, because they're takings-away. I think of a thought, and it's suddenly gone - like having a picture whipped out of its frame. Or I try to picture something in my mind, but the picture dissolves as fast as I can make it. I have a particular idea, but can't keep it in mind; and then I lose the general idea; and then the general idea of a general idea; and in two or three jumps my mind is a blank - all my thoughts gone, blanked out or erased.'"

And this is only one footnote of one page of one section of one book. And there are several books by Oliver Sacks, each of them filled with conversations and observations like this. So forgive him, forgive him for the sense of shock you feel when you get about halfway through this book and realize it's a horror story, "Flowers for Algernon" over and over again. Forgive him because he didn't know that the miracle drug would fail again and again, would send the patients, not all of them but a lot of them, into horrifying hallucinations, psychotic episodes and eventually comas. Forgive him because although you're reading about the case studies serially, with the long, slow cumulative effect that that implies, he experienced them simultaneously, without the chance to learn from his mistakes. And, finally, forgive him because he wrote this book at least in part to convince the medical establishment of the drawbacks to the miracle drug, and because the book is fascinating. And he seems like a good guy. So there you go.