Letters by Oliver Sacks

Author:Oliver Sacks [Sacks, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

To F. Robert Rodman

August 18, 1979

11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY

Dear Bob,

It was very good, as always, talking to you last week—I am sorry that I let months elapse, and appreciated your occasional kindly calls in the interval, even though I didn’t respond to them. […]

I thought of you last week, on waking from a fascinating dream (which bore on some things you had said about your running, and I about my swimming). I dreamt I was on the Moon—it was not clear how or why, nor did it seem to matter!—and taking my first Moon-Walk. At first, with the unprecedentedly altered gravity, and thus the unsuitability of my own gravity-sensors etc., I could not calibrate my own movements, alternated between absurd, wild overshootings and underestimates, etc., and had to take extraordinary pains to count, calculate, cautiously, consciously, to work out my own trajectories, as if I were a missile, or a lesson in ballistics—a tremendously difficult (and somehow absurd) trigonometrical exercise applied to “myself” (or, rather, this body which had become so altered, almost alienated, because of the alteration of gravity, and the inappropriacy of its customary, gravity-oriented responses).[*32] But—by degrees—I acquired skill: indeed became quite skillful, without, however, being able for a moment to relax my conscious cautious calculating and counting; thus I acquired competence, and skill, in the total absence of Ease or Grace, and it all felt very artificial and unnatural to me, and dichotomizing into a ballistic calculator (my “mind”) and a ballistic object (my “body”). And then, all of a sudden, I got the hang, I got the feel, of a wonderful new motion, a most free and joyous sort of leaping-walking, body and spirit completely joined in a most free and easy, natural-graceful motion. I said to myself in the dream, “Ballistics has become Ballet, Metrication Music,” and then I woke up—and wrote it all down!

“Wrote it all down!” Ah, if only I could!! So many thoughts, teeming, resolving, ceaseless, I don’t know whether they are a joy or torment: rather they are joy to entertain, and a torment when they cannot be given outer, manifest, public form. It is joy to fill my “Notebooks,” write notes on patients, write letters to friends—and this is a million-and-a-half words a year—but somehow, or sometimes, an evasion of the one thing I must do. The Book of Job has almost everything in it, including precisely this feeling, when Job cries out:

O that my words were now written!

O that they were printed in a book!

That they were graven with an iron pen and lead

In the rock for ever!

These feelings, always with me, have reached a sort of climax today, because I am going away tomorrow, to the North once again, with its dangerous allures—in the half-desperate hopes of writing my maddening leg-book, so intolerably inhibited and postponed. The absolute need to write it out, if only so that I do not, once again, act it out, and I cannot help some fears and inner quakings, when I think on my last journey North in August ’74.

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