Upon reading “Sabbath,” neither my dad nor I realized that it would be Oliver Sacks’s last published article before his death. But perhaps there is something fitting about it- as a bookend to an extraordinary life and as an expression of a powerful and spiritual ideal.
He had no shortage of fascinating topics to write about, and indeed he had written about them. Besides for his long-lasting career as a neurologist and professor of medicine (including at AECOM), he wrote bestselling nonfiction books on various scientific topics, such as the hallucination and the effect of music on the brain. However, he is perhaps most well known for his “clinical anecdotes.” Books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and Awakenings (which inspired an Oscar-nominated movie starring Robin Williams and Robert de Niro) resurrected the long-dormant tradition of writing medical case studies. He also wrote articles for publications like The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, as well as for the New York Times in his last years.
His fluid prose and vivid, poetic description helped bring scientific and medical concepts to life for his readers. He generated awe, wonder, humor and pathos into descriptions of phenomena, neurological illnesses as varied as prosopagnosia (the inability to distinguish faces, a condition he himself suffered from) and Tourette’s syndrome (a nervous disorder which can cause unintended movements and tics). Dr. Sacks provided even more of a glimpse into his daily life and the childhood circumstances that propelled him toward his later fascinations with science and medical career in his autobiography, Uncle Tungsten. In it, he tells mainly of his childhood, focusing on his chemist uncle (the titular “Uncle Tungsten”) and the manic passion he sparked in the young Oliver for chemistry and other scientific areas. It tells of his interest in collecting the various elements of the periodic table, of chemistry-set explosions, of pranking visitors with gallium teaspoons that would melt to the bottom of their teacups.
It also tells, though, of his childhood growing up in an Orthodox Jewish household in London, a childhood brutally disrupted by WWII. The effect of his hardship-filled life in that period, he believed, is what turned him atheist at age 14. But the memories of his religious childhood remain, even if only as a cultural aside (whether talking about his grandfather who would wake up if his yarmulke fell off in his sleep, or about his many first cousins including Israeli diplomat and politician Abba Eban and Nobel Laureate in Economics Robert Aumann).
While he still retained, according to many critics, a level of spirituality in his writings and thinking about science, the rest of his life (San Francisco in the sixties, many years in neurology in New York) did not seem to reflect the religious feeling with which he was raised.
A few months ago Dr Sacks published an article in the New York Times that at eighty-one he had received a diagnosis of a melanoma in his eye. The cancer not only blinded him in that eye, but also metastasized to other parts of his body. That first article focused on his feelings about being suddenly confronted by death. However, he followed it with a series of articles, covering a range of topics spanning from his recent loss of hearing, to revisiting his love for chemistry and correlating the elements on the periodic table to different ages and stages of his life.
But the last article was about the Shabbat. In it, he begins by describing how his family would observe Shabbat as a child- his mother, one of the first female surgeons in the UK (and almost certainly the first Orthodox woman in that category), would “doff her surgical identity and attire and devote herself to making gefilte fish.” Though his parents (both physicians) would keep their phone on the hook in case of emergency, his Shabbat, was peaceful and largely ritualistic.
He remembers his family as well as the Jewish community in his neighborhood in London where everyone would close their shops for Shabbos and gather together in the vibrant shul. This is in contrast to how he describes the shul and community after WWII, when London was barraged with bombs and the Jewish presence disintegrated in its wake, with many moving to Israel, US, Canada and Australia or even simply assimilating more and more into secular culture.
Sacks describes his escaping from home, his struggles and drug addictions in California, his recovery in New York, and his development as a science writer. He skims over to the 1990s, when he had found a measure of balance in his life and he came to know his cousin, Professor Robert Aumann, Israeli Nobel Laureate in economics and Orthodox Jew whom Sacks describes as “a man of remarkable appearance with his robust, athletic build and long white beard that made him, even at 60, look like an ancient sage.” In Professor Aumann, Sacks found someone who embodied the commitment which he had been lacking in his youth, along with warmth, caring, and a simultaneous rationality and faith which never seemed to contradict.
Sacks describes various encounters between the two of them over the years in a tone that conveys respect. Most of all, Sacks remembers the Shabbat meal that he had attended at the home of Dr. Aumann on his first visit to Israel in over 60 years. “The peace of the Sabbath,” he writes of his experience, “of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?”
Interestingly, while “Sabbath” was Dr. Sacks’s last article published before his death, a posthumous article (apparently one of several to come, but the only one published as of this writing) was posted online this week. It is called “Urge,” and it a case study about Walter, a man with a rare disease called Kluver-Bercy syndrome, which did not allow him to stop his activity.
His urges were insatiable and he could stay in the same activity for hours at a time. “If you put a car on the table, {he} would have eaten it.” It took nine years and a prison sentence for him to acquire the help he needed to put on the brakes and rest. Perhaps that, too, can fit into the mosaic- an extreme example of what can happen when one cannot even choose to stop. It is what happens when one does not have the obligation, or even the choice to rest.
More and more, people in the world at large write of their “technology Sabbaths,” in which they disconnect for a day just to feel the peace that comes from living in “a time outside time.” In the hyperconnected world we live in, where people bring their work on vacation and there is constant update and feedback, the neverending connection loop prevents clear, calm moments.
Sacks recognized that the world needs rest, the world needs Sabbath. As he said in the last paragraph of “Sabbath”:
“And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”