Review: ‘On the Move’ by Oliver Sacks

When Oliver Sacks lived in Los Angeles during his medical residency in the early 1960s, he would leave work on Friday and fly down Route 66 on his motorcycle, traveling 500 miles to the Grand Canyon for a weekend of hiking. “I would ride through the night, lying flat on the tank; the bike had only 30 horsepower, but if I lay flat, I could get it to a little over a hundred miles per hour,” Sacks writes in his memoir, “On the Move.” “Sometimes I felt that I was inscribing a line on the surface of the earth, at other times that I was poised motionless above the ground, the whole planet rotating silently beneath me.”

For anyone who’s read Oliver Sacks’ work even casually, this vision of the neurologist-in-motion feels like a startling departure. Readers of “Awakenings” or “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” know Sacks’ active mind, his powers of observation and his curiosity. But as the title of this memoir suggests, the subject here is the forward propulsion of the writer and physician in focus here, the energy behind his 12 popular science books and articles in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Scientific American and other publications. “On the Move,” the title, is borrowed from a poem of the same name by Sack’s friend, the poet Thom Gunn, its closing lines reflecting restlessness, a permanent state of arriving, as the best way to give life meaning:

At worst, one is in motion; and at best,

Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,

One is always nearer by not keeping still.

And for much of this absorbing book, Sacks rarely keeps still. He hikes. He swims. He travels. He competes in weightlifting competitions and wins. Although he often mentions his shyness, he has the most remarkable friends. In his years in San Francisco, a casual hello to fellow motorcyclists turns him into the informal medical adviser to the Hells Angels. He becomes friends with the co-discoverer of DNA structure, Francis Crick, and the poet W.H. Auden. He chats with truck drivers and truck stop waitresses. He corresponds with paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, whose narrative case studies become the model for Sacks’ own books. He adds a zig to this blur of motion, becoming addicted to drugs — amphetamines, of course — taking them by vein and by mouth before kicking the habit in 1967.

And he writes. Sacks fills several notebooks on a two-month-long cross-country motorcycle trip. At his first clinical position at a headache clinic in the Bronx, he writes his first book, “Migraine” while on holiday in England, using patient histories to communicate with a lay audience, a format that he would follow for many of his books. It infuriated the clinic director, who first threatens Sacks for writing the book, then savages it, then plagiarizes sections of it and finally fires Sacks for producing it. Sacks writes letters to relatives: a beloved aunt, his parents, and scientific colleagues. He writes detailed notes on his patients. To date he has filled nearly a thousand journals, he reports, keeping notebooks handy at his bedside, even at the swimming pool or shore. Swimming, he writes “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.”

The son of London physicians, he followed two of his three older brothers into medicine. It’s before his departure for Oxford in 1951 that Sacks’ father asks his youngest son how he feels about girls. Sacks tells his father the truth. He prefers boys, but he adds, “Don’t tell Ma — she won’t be able to take it.” He was right. Her reaction is vicious. She calls her son “an abomination” and says she wishes he had not been born. But for all its ferocity, the explosion is brief and the rift it produces seems to close and then vanish. Still, Sacks writes, “her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.”

Such revelations about the state of his emotions are rare. He does not dwell on darkness. He never reveals how he broke his amphetamine addiction or what that felt like. He states in passing that he hasn’t had sex in 35 years, but never remarks on what that means to him. Even when he acknowledges feeling isolated or hurt, he never lingers on the bad feelings. It’s not until the book’s end, where he writes with obvious joy about finding love, that he reveals the strong emotion that surely has been there all along.

“There was an intense emotionality at this time: music I loved, or the long golden sunlight of late afternoon, would set me weeping. I was not sure what I was weeping for, but I would feel an intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.” He had fallen in love with Bill Hayes, author of “The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy.”

In February, Sacks revealed in an essay in The New York Times that he has terminal cancer. Still, it appears this memoir will not be his last book; he wrote that he has several others near completion.

“The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other,” he says on his memoir’s final page. “In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.”

Jenni Laidman is a frequent Printers Row Journal contributor.

“On the Move”

By Oliver Sacks, Knopf, 403 pages, $27.95