On the Move: A Life Book by Oliver Sacks

 I just finished this fabulous book in 2 days. On the Move: A Life Book by Oliver Sacks

Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.

– Søren Kierkegaard

I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and at last count had nearly a thousand. They come in all shapes and sizes, from little pocket ones which I carry around with me to enormous tomes. I always keep a notebook by my bedside, for dreams as well as nighttime thoughts, and I try to have one by the swimming pool or the lakeside or the seashore; swimming too is very productive of thoughts which I must write, especially if they present themselves, as they sometimes do, in the form of whole sentences or paragraphs

Oliver Sacks jotting down a fleeting thought. Credit: Oliver Sacks

The need to think on paper is not confined to notebooks. It spreads onto the backs of envelopes, menus, whatever scraps of paper are at hand. And I often transcribe quotations I like, writing or typing them on pieces of brightly colored paper and pinning them to a bulletin board.

It seems to me that I discover my thoughts through the act of writing, in the act of writing. Occasionally, a piece comes out perfectly, but more often my writings need extensive pruning and editing, because I may express the same thought in many different ways. I can get waylaid by tangential thoughts and associations in mid-sentence, and this leads to parentheses, subordinate clauses, sentences of paragraphic length. I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive.

There’s also a great episode of the Radio Lab podcast that celebrated Sacks’ 80th birthday a couple of years before his passing in 2015. In the episode, they interview him about his career, his experiences with his patients at Mount Carmel, and the stir caused in the medical community after he published his first book Awakenings.