Oliver Sacks

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety four, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a doctor. He was born and grew up in London, but since the mid sixties has lived and worked in America. In nineteen sixty nine he treated catatonic patients with the drug L Dopa, and briefly and miraculously they came back to life.

Presenter0:46

The book he wrote about the incident, Awakenings, inspired the film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. He's written other books too. Although now a distinguished professor of neurology, he's reached out beyond the frontiers of medicine with his humane and literary accounts of his patients' illnesses. He is Dr. Oliver Sachs. Dr. Sachs, some of the case histories you've written about are strange beyond belief. Do you listen to the descriptions of their symptoms when they come to see you and think, My goodness, this is a good story? I mean, rather like a journalist.

Oliver Sacks1:19

At first I don't. Um at first I'm faced by a human being in trouble, although also a human being who's trying to articulate something which he can't understand and which is strange beyond imagination.

Oliver Sacks1:34

Often at some point the idea may come to me that it'll

Oliver Sacks1:38

be a good story or worth telling.

Presenter1:41

Let's take one of your most famous cases, then the Doctor P., the man who mistook his wife for a hat. He in fact did that very thing in front of you in your room, didn't he?

Oliver Sacks1:52

Oh, yes, indeed. He um he could see things clearly, but he couldn't interpret them. He got the meaning wrong, and when he went to reach for his hat he got his wife's head, which was approximately the same shape.

Presenter2:05

And how did his wife react?

Oliver Sacks2:07

She was obviously used to this, and she gave a sort of tired, accommodating smile.

Presenter2:12

And he did this kind of thing all of the time. He patted parking meters on the head like children, didn't he?

Presenter2:17

But but what would he say, for example, if you gave him an ordinary everyday object and asked him what it was, and would he often not recognize it?

Oliver Sacks2:25

Um it would depend. If it had a simple geometrical shape, like this aspen box in front of me, it you know, he might recognize it, but if it was something complex, like a flower, he might give a a sort of strange, over elaborate, pedantic geometrical description, but not get it, like on one occasion he called a a glove.

Oliver Sacks2:50

A receptacle with five out pouchings.

Presenter2:54

So, I mean, the rest of us, if we met him or saw that going on, would think he was completely batty, frankly. But he wasn't. It was something.

Presenter3:02

specifically wrong with his brain, but otherwise he functioned normally.

Oliver Sacks3:05

Yes, indeed extremely well. And the rest of his brain, including the musical part of his brain, was superbly entire.

Presenter3:12

Were you able to help him?

Oliver Sacks3:14

Well, he was a very gifted musician.

Oliver Sacks3:16

And um

Oliver Sacks3:18

In a sense, my advice to him

Oliver Sacks3:21

was to try and organize more and more of his life through music. He was already doing this in a sense by inventing eating songs and shaving songs, and if he organized the the bathroom according to a song, he could usually find things.

Presenter3:39

So you can often use music as a therapy in your work. How important is music to you personally?

Oliver Sacks3:46

I think extremely important, and I think it always has been. I can't live without it.

Presenter3:51

So what's the first record you'll take with you?

Oliver Sacks3:55

Well, for myself, mostly I love classical music, but I think the first record will remind me of an experience with a patient, a young man. He'd been a hippie in the sixties, and then he'd had a brain tumor and had lost his memory, and in effect was marooned in the sixties.

Oliver Sacks4:13

He used to be a deadhead, a passionate admirer of the grateful dead.

Oliver Sacks4:18

One day when the Grateful Dead were in town, I took him to a concert, I abducted him, I smuggled him out of the hospital.

Oliver Sacks4:26

And in the first half of the concert, where there was only music from the sixties.

Oliver Sacks4:32

This amnesiac man who couldn't re who hadn't registered anything after nineteen seventy was totally at home. It was wonderful to see him. He knew all the songs and uh and rejoiced in them. And uh in the second half of the concert, where they played songs from the seventies and the eighties, he was very bewildered and lost, and he said he thought this was music from the future.

Oliver Sacks4:57

And this was uncanny to hear this, because, of course, this is a future he he would never know.

Oliver Sacks5:03

The next day he didn't remember going to the concert.

Oliver Sacks5:08

But strangely, he did have a memory of some of the new music.

Oliver Sacks5:13

This happened pretty recently, and I love the Grateful Dead myself. To my great surprise, I'd never been to a rock concert. I danced for three hours. I had an effusion on my knee for two weeks afterwards, but it was worth it. And so I think, atypical though it is, the Grateful Dead.

Speaker 35:31

See that girl, barefooting alone? Whistling and singing, she's a carrying on. Got laughin' in her eyes, dancing in her feet. She's a neon right finding you can dance on the screen.

Presenter5:48

Come on.

Presenter5:50

Okay, yeah.

Presenter5:57

The Grateful Dead and the Golden Road. Can we talk, Oliver Sachs, about Awakenings, your book which became a highly successful film, and it is, of course, the story of some eighty patients in a mental hospital in New York whom you in the summer of 1969 awoke as it were from an immobilized trance-like state which they've been in for decades. Tell me first why they were in that condition.

Oliver Sacks6:22

Well, all of these patients had had a vowel illness, an encephalitis or sleeping sickness, which formed a world wide pandemic just after the First World War. First when I saw these people I wondered what's going on inside? Is there an inside?

Oliver Sacks6:39

Um

Oliver Sacks6:40

The nurses at the hospital who'd been there also for decades were convinced that there were intact people walled up in this, and they were convinced of this partly because of brief releases. Sometimes if a patient sneezed, he could move for thirty seconds, or sometimes if a fire engine might alert him for thirty seconds.

Presenter6:57

Doom sounds.

Oliver Sacks7:01

So in this tantalizing way one knew they could be awakened for a few seconds.

Presenter7:05

And then there was this drug, L Dopa, which you used or persuaded that you should be allowed to use because you thought it would wake them up, and indeed it did. Can you remember the moment when you first realized it was going to work?

Oliver Sacks7:19

I think probably with the patient I call, Leonard.

Oliver Sacks7:23

Although in the documentary film which was made you see him and his name is Ed.

Oliver Sacks7:27

Um his eyes became brighter.

Oliver Sacks7:30

He became more alert. He started to look around.

Oliver Sacks7:34

Though I think perhaps the most um dramatic awakening was with another patient, one called Lola.

Oliver Sacks7:43

And with her there was no warming up period at all. She um she suddenly came to the city.

Presenter7:49

Can you skin?

Oliver Sacks7:49

As she walked down the corridor and she burst into conversation.

Oliver Sacks7:53

Now I had thought theoretically this might happen.

Oliver Sacks7:56

But it was it was absolutely unimaginable.

Presenter7:59

There were, as you say, lots of of strange and emotional experiences connected with all of this because suddenly.

Presenter8:07

women who'd gone to sleep as girls, as it were, looked in the mirror and discovered they were grey old ladies, and then others who discovered that they'd been whatever, divorced, deserted or left for Barmy or dead.

Oliver Sacks8:19

Well, th this was overwhelming with the uh patient uh Rose, whom uh whom really Harold Pinter.

Oliver Sacks8:25

wrote about in a kind of Alaska. When she came to, she burst out singing, and and she she was singing all sorts of songs from the mid twenties and talking about Gershwin as if he were still alive. And we wondered where she was, and she

Oliver Sacks8:39

She said.

Oliver Sacks8:41

I know it's nineteen sixty-nine, but I feel it's nineteen twenty-six.

Oliver Sacks8:45

I know I'm sixty four, but I feel I'm twenty one.

Oliver Sacks8:49

She said I've been a spectator for the last forty three years, though I don't think she was even a spectator.

Presenter8:54

But washi, that's the question. You said earlier on that the nurses were convinced they'd been locked up inside themselves, these people. I mean, what a horror that must be if they had, had they?

Oliver Sacks9:02

Well, I don't think uh in the case of Leonard's case there was certainly a full consciousness and a sense that his body was a prison. With other patients I think there was some strange sort of twilight of diminished consciousness and feeling, with sometimes occasional flashes when something would get through.

Presenter9:21

Let's have your second record there.

Oliver Sacks9:23

I think my first love when I was a little boy was Bach. I grew up in a house which was full of Bach.

Oliver Sacks9:30

And I adore the liturgical music, above all the the great B minor Mass.

Presenter10:28

The Monteverde choir, conducted by John Elliott Gardner, singing the chorus et incarnatus est from Bach's Mass in B minor.

Presenter10:36

It must have been an incredible summer, that summer of'69, to watch these people who'd been written off and forgotten suddenly returning to life. Did the did the film capture the excitement?

Oliver Sacks10:45

Well I I think it did.

Oliver Sacks10:48

The Leonard himself when El Dopo originally came out in

Oliver Sacks10:52

In'sixty seven he called the agent in the brain. He said he tapped out dopamine is resurrectamine, and I think the feeling of resurrection was overwhelming that summer.

Presenter11:05

He used to tap this out on a sort of spelling board, didn't he?

Oliver Sacks11:07

Yes, right, yes, one letter at a time. And certainly the initial feeling just of being alive and joy in this, I think was very well captured.

Presenter11:17

But then things began to go wrong. The the drug had side effects and the patients began to regress. What what happened?

Oliver Sacks11:25

Everything indeed started to go wrong in some patients in a few days, and others in a few weeks. I think some of this was.

Oliver Sacks11:35

Directly to do with the nervous system and the drug. I think this was one sort of problem.

Oliver Sacks11:40

The other, I think, was a sheer identity problem, as with this pati these patients who came to in their sixties.

Oliver Sacks11:48

having not had a middle to their life.

Presenter11:51

In fact, it wasn't shown in the film, but Leonard, who.

Presenter11:56

went to sleep at aged about thirty and woke up aged fifty two. He, in fact, became sexually obsessed, didn't he?

Oliver Sacks12:02

Well, certainly sexually excited. I don't know whether obsessed is the right word. Um but there was the whole uh the whole ward was a a place of great sexual excitement, which sometimes took the form of mild flirting and sometimes of much more than that. How much this might have been a direct effect of the drug, and how much these were just people who'd be deprived of life and sort of, you know, released into normality.

Presenter12:28

In a sense what you'd done, what the drug had done was open a chemical window, hadn't it? And then that window just began to close again. Why why couldn't it b be opened again fully?

Oliver Sacks12:38

I think there just weren't enough nerve cells to to keep it open.

Oliver Sacks12:43

And uh finally, I think so much of the brain had been destroyed.

Presenter12:47

Record number three.

Oliver Sacks12:50

I grew up in a in a household full of music and piano playing, but um my own taste as a as a romantic adolescent went towards Chopin.

Oliver Sacks13:01

And in particular, I loved the Rubenstein recordings of the Mazurkas I knew them all by heart myself, and this one was a particular favourite.

Presenter14:06

Chopin's Mazurka number one in B-flat major opus seven played by Artur Rubenstein. Do you do you play, Doctor Sachs?

Oliver Sacks14:12

Um I I used to play in fact I used to know all the Mazurkas by heart, and once just after the war.

Oliver Sacks14:19

When we were in Switzerland we had a concert in a hotel and I played all the mazurkas.

Presenter14:24

You'd have been very little, huh?

Oliver Sacks14:25

I was just twelve then.

Oliver Sacks14:27

But that was sort of about the end of the piano for me. I had a very beloved music teacher who died when I was eleven, and really I I've never played since.

Presenter14:37

But you still have a piano?

Oliver Sacks14:38

Oh, yeah, my father played a lot and he gave me his Bechstein, a beautiful eight-foot Bechstein, but I'm afraid I hardly play it.

Presenter14:47

Your father was a doctor, wasn't he? A GP in in North London, and your your mother was a surgeon, which was

Oliver Sacks14:49

Yeah.

Presenter14:53

Unusual, presumably, I would have thought, anyway, in the early part of this century.

Oliver Sacks14:55

Extremely, yes.

Presenter14:57

And is it true that she she had you dissecting a female body when you were still a a young boy?

Oliver Sacks15:03

Yes, I was fourteen.

Presenter15:05

You must remember it vividly.

Oliver Sacks15:07

Well, I think a merciful repression has probably crept in, but I think it was rather a traumatic experience.

Presenter15:13

Um did you did you fall inevitably into medicine then? Was there a sort of family pressure for you to become a doctor?

Oliver Sacks15:20

Dumbed.

Presenter15:20

Yeah.

Oliver Sacks15:20

Uh

Presenter15:20

Some kind.

Oliver Sacks15:22

I suppose so in a way, although um um all of us, I think, reacted against this and had other interests. My own love was for for marine biology, and I I I got pushed into medicine slightly reluctantly.

Presenter15:36

But you had a love of poetry and reading, too, didn't you?

Oliver Sacks15:39

I think so.

Presenter15:39

Uh di didn't you form a literary society at school that uh got you into a bit of trouble?

Oliver Sacks15:44

Um yes, well I was at St Paul's and uh my contemporaries were Jonathan Miller and Eric Korn and we were all biology lovers and all in the same form, but we also between us founded a literary society and I was the president and Jonathan was the secretary and Eric was the treasurer and we were inexcusably successful.

Oliver Sacks16:06

And one day the High Master called me in, and he said, Saxe,

Oliver Sacks16:10

You don't exist.

Oliver Sacks16:12

And he annulled the society. I said, You can't do that, sir, and why? And he said, I can do what I want, and I need give you no reasons. I mean, nowadays, of course, there'd be a revolt.

Presenter16:24

But why did

Speaker 116:24

What does he do?

Oliver Sacks16:26

I I don't know. As I say, I think in some way we were too successful or we were sort of uh you know uh seen as as talkative, aggressive, clever, intolerable young Jews.

Presenter16:37

But you you'd also, uh as a boy of six been evacuated for four years during the war, hadn't you separated from your family? Perhaps that was rather like being banned, like being told you didn't exist. Is that why it made such a

Presenter16:50

an impression on you.

Oliver Sacks16:52

I think the psychological impact of evacuation has never been properly described. It was overwhelming for me, but I was one of three and a half million kids who were sent away. I was just six.

Oliver Sacks17:04

I hardly saw my parents in four years or so.

Oliver Sacks17:08

And that was a very, very evil, evil time of life and I see with many of my contemporaries at a glance I can see that they too have been marked by evacuation.

Oliver Sacks17:20

And certainly when I came back to London when I was just ten, my passion was for physics and chemistry and for the hard sciences where everything was predictable and stayed in place.

Presenter17:31

Let's have record number four.

Oliver Sacks17:34

Well, going back to the early Halcyon days before the war, my parents used to go to a musical or whatever every week.

Oliver Sacks17:42

And they had adored Chu Chin Chao.

Oliver Sacks17:45

And we had the score of this, and it used to be a family sing song, and in particular my father, who was a huge man with a bowel chess with a great resonant bass, used to sing Here be Oysters, Stewed and Honey, and Fricasied Sturgeon's Row. I can still hear him.

Speaker 118:00

Eby oysters stewed in honey, and conquering s cooled in snow

Speaker 318:10

Here be shellfish stuffed with spices.

Speaker 118:10

Yeah.

Speaker 118:13

Damn.

Speaker 318:14

And frequent seed storage and roll A sword.

Oliver Sacks18:24

Uh

Speaker 118:39

Here be lambstales baked in butter

Speaker 318:43

Lovers eggs from afar Hear me humming birds in jelly And lizards from Zanzibar

Presenter18:57

Martin Lawrence in the chorus of Chuchin Chow singing Here Be Oysters

Presenter19:01

So you went up to Oxford in the fifties, Oliver Saxe, then to work at the Middlesex Hospital in London, and then a hospital in Birmingham. But in nineteen sixty, when you would have been, what, twenty seven, you went to Canada, and as far as living and working are concerned, you've never come back. So what was it, then, that that captured you there?

Oliver Sacks19:20

I think the feeling of spaciousness and the West I loved cowboy films, I love Fenimore Cooper, although that's not exactly the West, and I think I wanted a feeling of moral spaciousness as well, and perhaps there's a certain feeling that that England or Europe was was close and incestuous, and I'm still very nostalgic for the West Coast.

Presenter19:43

But eventually you went East and you went to New York and you became a a real doctor, as it were. Your first book was in fact about migraine, wasn't it? And it it en enjoyed a a certain popular success because it wasn't just a textbook. You were doing that from the very beginning. It it was a good read so that non-specialists could read it. Lots of case histories. You suffer from migraine yourself and you've arrived here with one. Does that mean to say you were dreading coming here?

Oliver Sacks20:07

Well, the timing's wrong. I expected to have one tomorrow. I thought I hoped I would rise to the occasion and then fall into a migraine. But I woke up with a real blind this morning.

Presenter20:18

You woke up because you're also an insomniac, aren't you?

Oliver Sacks20:21

Yeah.

Oliver Sacks20:22

Um but but this time I um

Oliver Sacks20:25

Uh I think migraine sometimes gets into dreams, and I I had a funny dream about people with the middle of their face missing.

Presenter20:28

Yeah.

Oliver Sacks20:32

And then when I woke up I I had the so-called bagel vision. When I looked at the Times I saw a ring of newsprint and a blank in the middle.

Presenter20:41

Cool.

Oliver Sacks20:41

Anyhow, that's gone now.

Presenter20:43

What what else don't you like? You don't like heat very much, do you?

Oliver Sacks20:47

Uh no, I don't like heat. I'm I'm a bit of a claustrophobe. Um don't like

Presenter20:52

Didn't like darkness.

Oliver Sacks20:54

No, I don't like darkness. I'm I'm afraid of the dark. I keep a light on.

Presenter20:59

Perhaps it's why you don't sleep.

Presenter21:02

But you also take notes wherever you go. Do you got a a pocket full of pencils of various kinds and a and a book which you have by you even as we speak?

Oliver Sacks21:05

And sort of various kinds of

Oliver Sacks21:09

Right. Um well, I th I think this has been part of my life probably since I was about eight or nine. I don't know whether it's taking notes, but some creation of

Oliver Sacks21:18

of a verbal equivalent of experience or re-experiencing in words is right at the heart of me.

Oliver Sacks21:25

And um I need to do it as I

Oliver Sacks21:28

as I need to breathe.

Presenter21:29

Let's have some more music.

Oliver Sacks21:32

I love Mozart Oppo often without knowing the plot or the characters too well.

Oliver Sacks21:37

I think I love Don Giovanni above all.

Oliver Sacks21:41

and especially that dramatic scene.

Oliver Sacks21:44

where he is claimed and goes down to hell.

Speaker 121:48

Perfect remorse, send us a dear dispute, and dance for our great land.

Presenter22:49

Part of the final scene of Mozart's Don Giovanni, sung by Eberhard Weschter and Giuseppe Tadei, and the Philharmonia Chorus conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.

Presenter22:58

How do you work these days, Oliver Saxe? Do you have smart consulting rooms now you're a celebrity and people come to see you and pay you large fees? Or are you still on the wards, so to speak?

Oliver Sacks23:08

Um I'm basically on the wards. I spend uh three days working in hospitals. Most of these are chronic hospitals or charity hospitals. I see an occasional private patient, perhaps one a month.

Presenter23:21

But but making money out of such people worries you, does it? Out of people with the sort of problems

Oliver Sacks23:24

People with a solar

Oliver Sacks23:26

I I I think so, and I um I was always very bad at at charging and never could.

Presenter23:31

I'm the f

Presenter23:32

So you you move around New York as it were in the day going from one institution to another.

Presenter23:38

Seeing various different kinds of patients. Uh I read that in one particular institution in the Bronx you're you're always terrifi terrified that you'll be mistaken for a patient and kept in.

Oliver Sacks23:47

Oh yes, well this was in the State Hospital and um

Oliver Sacks23:52

I'm always very careful I was always very careful there to wear my white coat and my identification. I think perhaps at that time my beard was longer and I and I maybe looked a little bit more eccentric. But it might be difficult to to prove one was sane.

Presenter24:06

You have, as you just said, a a beard and and the gold rimmed spectacles. Really, you look ve very much or Robin Williams look very much like you in the film, except that you're much larger than he is, aren't you?

Oliver Sacks24:17

Right. And and now when I adjust my glasses people say I'm imitating Robin.

Presenter24:23

But he portrayed you as shy, gauche, insecure, as well as

Presenter24:28

compassionate and and deeply sincere. I I mean, it's a terribly difficult question for you to answer, really, but do you feel that it was a reasonably accurate put? Real.

Oliver Sacks24:35

Yeah.

Oliver Sacks24:37

I think was probably a somewhat sentimentalized one.

Oliver Sacks24:41

I think there's probably a a driving curiosity which may be the most central thing in me.

Oliver Sacks24:48

And I'm not always compassionate. I sometimes have to

Oliver Sacks24:52

Pull myself back and remind myself that I mustn't go too far.

Presenter24:58

Because, as you say, driving curiosity, and you've got the notebook, and you're writing a narrative on these people you see all the time. One almost has the impression that you're a.

Presenter25:06

An explorer, if you like, of the mind. And I suppose you get do you hooked up on that line of exploration and perhaps leave behind the the human dimension? Is that fair?

Oliver Sacks25:17

Is that fair? Well, I I think there's certainly a a danger of this. As a child my favorite reading was um Darwin and the Galapagos or Bates on the Amazon and sort of natural history explorations. And you can't quite have natural history explorations of a human being. He is an an other facing you.

Presenter25:35

The character, the Robin Williams character we keep mentioning you, that is also tells Leonard the patient at one point that he isn't married because he's no good with people. Is that true of you, too?

Oliver Sacks25:46

Um I am I'm not very good at dealing with people, and um I think I probably prefer the defined roles of physician, investigator, explorer.

Oliver Sacks25:58

Or whatever.

Presenter26:00

Next record.

Oliver Sacks26:02

I mentioned earlier that I used to love reading Darwin, I still love reading Darwin.

Oliver Sacks26:09

Above all, I like to imagine

Oliver Sacks26:12

How he must have felt when he visited the Galapagos, where he saw evolution and creation happen.

Oliver Sacks26:18

I also wonder the literary part of me, if you want, wonders how Melville felt when he went to the Galapagos four years later and saw the dawn of creation there.

Oliver Sacks26:30

And there's a wonderful piece which Melville wrote called The Incantadas, about a half-allegorical.

Oliver Sacks26:37

Galapagos. A few months ago I heard an amazing rendering of this, in which the text was recited by Gielgud and set to music by a very gifted young American musician Tobias Picker, in there seemed to me a miraculous juxtaposition of text and voice and music.

Speaker 126:57

Let us first glance low to the lowermost shelf of all.

Speaker 127:02

What outlandish beings are these

Speaker 127:10

Erectus men

Speaker 127:12

They stand all round the rock like sculptured cardiatides, supporting the next range of eaves above.

Presenter27:25

Sir John Gilgood reading from the Encantadus by Tobias Picker with the Houston Symphony conducted by Christoph Eschenbach.

Presenter27:34

What you deal in, your business really, i i is in the deficiencies of the brain, the the lack of something that the rest of us take for granted, like like the man who mistook his wife for a hat. Like the man with a warped sense of the vertical, who who walked in a leaning sort of way, rather like the Tower of Pisa. You couldn't help him in terms of making his brain better, but you did give him practical help, didn't you?

Oliver Sacks27:55

Well, he very beautifully suggested the solution to his own difficulties. He wondered if there was a sort of spirit level in the brain and if this was damaged in him, and I said yes. And he then wondered if one might not have such a level in the rim of the glasses, and use this. And I said, Yes, that's a great idea. Let's try it.

Presenter28:13

So what did you put two little spirit loves above the?

Oliver Sacks28:15

Yes.

Presenter28:16

So he just had to keep peering up to make sure he was vertical.

Oliver Sacks28:19

Yeah.

Presenter28:20

What about the man whom you could treat with drugs, the man with Tourette's syndrome, who twitched like a kind of demented tic-tac man, but um but who only wanted to be cured in the week and not at weekends? Tell me about him.

Oliver Sacks28:32

Yeah.

Oliver Sacks28:33

This man, while he was very disabled in a way by the sudden movements and violences of his trouettes, was also a very gifted amateur musician and a brilliant improviser at jazz, and some of his improvisations would start with a tick which would immediately be elaborated, and when he was put on medication to calm him down, he lost a lot of his playfulness and his creative ability. On the other hand, he was able to hold a steady job. And so after a while he suggested that that we should have him in two parts, that he should be steadied for Monday to Friday and kept sober, square with a drug, and he would be taken off it and let fly at weekends. Does he still do that? He still does that. He's uh he's a lovely man and uh he's really a friend now, and this it's now twenty-two years, and this double life has been quite stable.

Presenter29:14

Hey shit.

Presenter29:24

Record number seven.

Oliver Sacks29:27

I found myself in quite a deep depression.

Oliver Sacks29:30

Uh after my mother's death in seventy two.

Oliver Sacks29:34

And uh first there was a proper mourning, then I think uh a sort of melancholia, and in this sort of state the world curdles and coagulates and becomes horrible and meaningless and dark and hopeless.

Oliver Sacks29:48

And I was in this very grim state.

Oliver Sacks29:52

and walking along, when I suddenly felt a change of mood.

Oliver Sacks29:58

and a sort of lightness and a slight um memory of life.

Oliver Sacks30:03

And then I realized that I was hearing some music.

Oliver Sacks30:07

And this music was redemptive to me. I felt I if I could hold on to that music I could climb out of this this evil state, and Black Dog would leave me alone. It's a rather obscure, rarely known piece. I don't know that it's terribly distinguished, but for me it was redemptive.

Presenter31:25

One of Schubert's variations on a theme, Trocune Blumen, from Descherne Muderin, played by Alain Marion and Pascal Roger.

Presenter31:33

You'd um be all right on the desert island, I think, doctor Saxe, because uh you're a water lover, aren't you?

Oliver Sacks31:39

Um I'm I'm a passionate water lover, as my father was. I always carry my my flippers with me.

Presenter31:47

You've got them here. I need to go to the

Oliver Sacks31:48

Oh indeed. I have them right here.

Presenter31:51

And you have Eurodeal or the feet of a Eurodeal, Jonathan Miller told you.

Oliver Sacks31:55

Yeah, these are these are the sort of fat the the flat splayed feet of a of a giant amphibian. And Jonathan's no one to talk because he has size fifteen feet himself.

Presenter32:05

Yours are what

Oliver Sacks32:06

But

Presenter32:06

Yours must be that big.

Oliver Sacks32:07

Um ye yes, mine are perhaps broader, but still I want flippers as well.

Presenter32:07

Yeah.

Presenter32:11

Right. So swimming's an important part of your life then?

Oliver Sacks32:12

So

Oliver Sacks32:15

Um, yeah, a crucial part of my life.

Presenter32:17

And he'd spend a lot of time in the bath.

Oliver Sacks32:19

Yes, indeed, in the bath.

Presenter32:21

And you're not very practical. You don't cook for yourself, do you? I mean, you're not gonna cope on this island in that sense, I

Oliver Sacks32:28

Um oh no, I I think one can cope without cooking. I expect to harvest from the sea an enormous number of invertebrates, which is a former marine biologist I will be able to identify. I enjoy eating every phylum. I mean I will know which sea anemones to eat and which jellyfish.

Presenter32:47

So all of that will work. And and also perhaps you wouldn't suffer loneliness because

Presenter32:52

As we've said, you you're very wary of people, you don't like their illogicality, perhaps you'd be really quite pleased to have got away from them.

Oliver Sacks32:59

Well, I think on the island, though of course I would be an unemployed physician, a doctor who no longer has any patients, I think I would carry with me extremely vivid memories.

Oliver Sacks33:10

Of the patients and the characters I've seen over the last thirty years, they're still intensely alive for me.

Oliver Sacks33:18

But of course I'd be lonely any one would.

Presenter33:21

Last record.

Oliver Sacks33:23

I think on an island like this.

Oliver Sacks33:26

To survive, you'd need to have some sort of project. Now, there's a particular.

Oliver Sacks33:31

composer, whom I hate. I think he's awful, and I can't stand any of his music, but I'm assured that he's very, very great.

Oliver Sacks33:41

And um I don't know why I have this odd loathing of Beethoven.

Oliver Sacks33:45

But perhaps given all the time on the world, I could enter what everyone else tells me is his sublime world, and particularly the world of the final quartets.

Presenter34:56

Part of Beethoven's string quartet in C sharp minor, opus a hundred and thirty one, played by the Amadeus Quartet, which I presume is not the one out of the eight that you'd keep in that case, Oliver Saxe.

Oliver Sacks35:07

Um well, it would be Project Beethoven. I mean, perhaps he would um become my favorite. But no, I think what I want to keep is the Mass, as the B minor Mass. The Bach. The Bach.

Presenter35:18

What about your book?

Oliver Sacks35:20

Um well this business of having only eight

Oliver Sacks35:24

Records to choose from has tantalized me. I think I would like to take a book which was a very favourite book of my father's, and this is A Dictionary of Musical Themes, uh by Barlow and Morgenstern.

Oliver Sacks35:38

This book was published in uh in nineteen forty-nine, and it contains ten thousand musical themes.

Oliver Sacks35:46

And my father would open the book and leaf over the pages, and then suddenly one of the themes would come to life in his imagination and play for him, and this way I feel my repertoire would be increased from eight to ten thousand.

Presenter36:01

Sounds like a luxury, actually. What is your luxury?

Oliver Sacks36:04

Um I think that um the sea and marine life is closer to my heart than anything else, and I think uh therefore a um

Oliver Sacks36:15

snorkel or if possible a scuba apparatus so that I could swim in the sea, be with my fellow creatures. I think that would be the the happiest thing for me.

Presenter36:27

And you're never without your flippers anyway, so you're half equipped anyway, and we shall provide the rest. Oliver Sacks, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Oliver Sacks36:29

Yeah.

Oliver Sacks36:36

Thank you so much.

Speaker 336:45

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.