Finally getting somewhere

Memories of Oliver Sacks’s shy, eccentric brilliance by Jonathan Lynn

"There was a voraciousness about Oliver, a hunger for experiences. He seemed to feel that if something was good, a phenomenal amount of it was even better. Everything was in excess: his eating, his dieting (his way to lose weight was to have no food in his apartment and nothing in the fridge except ketchup and mustard – and germinating ferns, of course), his weight-lifting on Muscle Beach in Venice, California (he once held a world record), his love of high speed on his motorbike, his foolhardy experiments with amphetamine, his psychoanalysis (twice weekly at dawn for fifty years – “I think we’re finally getting somewhere”, he said shortly before he died), his enormous circle of friends in latter years, his desperate desire for fresh air which led him to force open the windows in our house, even the ones that didn’t open. Even his hypochondria was barely under control – if he got bored at dinner he would leave the table and lie on a sofa, palpating himself. The only exception to the excess was sex, whose pleasure, I think, was taken away from him by his mother until nearly the very end of his life. I never saw him really relaxed, except when swimming. He didn’t hang out watching TV; if he needed soothing and couldn’t swim he would sit at his grand piano and play Bach."

Read more: TLS