On The Move

by Oliver Sacks

Friends and partners permanently influence our thinking

I had been fascinated by such partnerships even as a boy; in my chemical days, I read about the partnership of Kirchhoff and Bunsen and how their very different minds, together, were indispensable for the discovery of spectroscopy. I had been fascinated, at Oxford, by reading the famous paper on DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick and learning how different the two men were. And while I was toiling away at my uninspired internship at Mount Zion, I was to read about another seemingly improbable and incongruous pair of researchers, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who were opening up the physiology of vision in the wildest, most beautiful way.

There is a danger, when old friends meet, that they will talk mostly of the past.

I miss him deeply, but like so many of my friends’ and mentors’ his voice has become an integral part of my thinking.

Abstraction as a way of interpreting the world Obviously Sacks was someone who thought a lot about how people interpret the world - his other bestsellers go into more detail about his work and his thoughts about this.

I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space.

This book highlights the difficult time he had in creating accurate descriptions of reality without recounting every minute detail.

I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with (in Clifford Geertz’s phrase) thick description.

Sacks’ personal experience fed into his ideas about mental models. As the chapters (and the years) progress, his description becomes more refined and universal.

I have thought about what you said of anecdote and narrative. I think we all live in a swirl of anecdotes… We (most of us) compose our lives into narratives… I wonder what the origin is of the urge to “compose” oneself.

Humans are storytelling creatures preeminently. We organize the world as a set of tales. How, then, can a person make any sense of his confusing environment if he cannot comprehend stories or surmise human intentions? In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life’s misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature.

On the relationship between writing and thinking:

It seems to me that I discover my thoughts through the act of writing, in the act of writing … I can get waylaid by tangential thoughts and associations in mid-sentence, and this leads to parentheses subordinate clauses, sentences of paragraph length I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive.

The act of writing is itself enough, it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life, ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.