Happy birthday to Oliver Sacks, who turned 75 on Wednesday. Years ago I read that Sacks, the great polymathic neurologist and friend of W.H. Auden, enjoyed reading the Oxford English Dictionary in bed with the aid of a magnifying glass, something I have also done. That sparked a sense of kinship I have always felt with Sacks and his books. Now I see he has resumed piano lessons after 60 years, an effort that reminds me of I.F. Stone taking up Greek in his seventies -- the triumph of hope. Here's Sacks:
"One of my own birthday resolutions, then, is to start every morning with one of the [Bach] preludes or fugues. Much as I delight in listening to Bach, there is no pleasure like actually playing, or trying to play, music — even if it is completely beyond one. One discovers new details and delights that may not be apparent with simple listening. And I am heartened to find that one can learn new pieces and acquire new skills, even well into one’s eighth decade."
ADDENDUM: A reader tells me of a fine profile of Sacks at Seed magazine.
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There's a good profile of Sacks at seedmagazine.com -- just search on his name. I've read all of his books (including an outlier about fern hunting in Mexico) and most interviews and profiles, but was surprised to learn that he was a friend of Thom Gunn. In the Seed interview, he also discusses his "Melanoma Journals", in which he's chronicling his experience of a rare form of ocular cancer. Fascinating man.
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