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Jul 9, 2015 · “Without music I should wish to die,” the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in a 1920 letter to a friend.One fateful afternoon half a century later, beloved British neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) — a Millay of the mind, a lover of poetry, and a scientist of enormous spiritual exuberance — came to live this sentiment as more than a dramatic hyperbole.
May 16, 2015 · May 16, 2015. When the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks was a schoolboy, a teacher noted on his report card: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.”. It was a perceptive ...
- Overview
- Sha-Zaam!
- Where Have You Gone?
- A Green Crab’s Shell, by Mark Doty
My friend Oliver Sacks was at home, hoping to glimpse the color of heaven. It was 1964. He was in his kitchen in Topanga Canyon, preparing a cocktail. It wasn’t an ordinary cocktail, being part amphetamine (“for general arousal,” he told me), part marijuana (“for added delirium”), and part LSD (“for hallucinogenic intensity”), and his plan was to gulp, wait … and then command heaven to appear.
Oliver was not a believer. I’m sure he didn’t imagine a heaven with white clouds and angels darting about. White wasn’t his color. If heaven existed, he thought it would be bluish—not a pale blue, but “true indigo,” a rich, intense, deep blue that he had never seen. Nor had anyone. The great painter Giotto had tried to paint heaven in indigo. He worked with a number of powders but hadn’t found the right formula. Oliver imagined it to be an “ecstatic blue,” bluer than the lapis lazuli stone favored by the ancient Egyptians, a blue inspired by the seas of the ancient Paleozoic (“How do you know that?” I asked. “I just do,” he said). He wanted, desperately, to see it.
This was a brazen desire. True indigo is the unicorn of colors, maybe hidden from us, Oliver thought, “because the color of heaven was not to be seen on Earth.” But he would try.
He swallowed his cocktail. He waited for 20 minutes. Then he turned to a blank white wall in his kitchen and shouted (“To whom?” I asked. “Eternity,” he said), “I want to see indigo now—now!”
All of a sudden “as if thrown by a giant paintbrush,” Oliver remembers that a “huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob” of color appeared magically on the kitchen wall. It was a miracle of blue. It was, he says, “luminous, numinous; it filled me with rapture.” It stayed in place for a very little while, and then, just as suddenly, vanished.
Come. Gone. He looked around, puzzled, as if his prize had been “snatched away,” and yet … he had seen it. He knew that, “yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up in the brain,” and having had a first “sip,” as he called it, he eagerly wanted more. So he went hunting. He visited museums, walked beaches, looked at gems, at shells. One time, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he got another very short glimpse in the sheen of an Egyptian jewel, but when he turned away and then looked back, he found only “blue and purple and mauve and puce—no indigo.”
That was 50 years ago. He never saw indigo again. Unless (and I can’t help thinking this), now that he’s left us, (Oliver died this week), he may be up there floating in an indigo-rich Paleozoic sea, surrounded not by angels but by pale blue cuttlefish, his favorite cephalopods. And looking up at him, winking quietly, I see a small crab, very much alive, that may be the only creature on Earth to experience Oliver’s favorite color all the time. I recently made this discovery (that heaven may be hiding here) in a poem by Mark Doty.
Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,
something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly
- Robert Krulwich
A new documentary, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, chronicles the late neurologist's efforts to understand perception, memory and consciousness. Sacks spoke to Fresh Air in 2012.
May 18, 2015 · Oliver Sacks in Greenwich Village in 1961, on his new BMW R60 (Photograph: Douglas White) This was the start of Dr. Sacks’s love affair with the world of physique and strength training — a deeply personal proto-demonstration of something he’d later come to demonstrate as a pioneering neurologist: that the mind is indivisible from the body.
Apr 9, 2021 · April 9, 2021, 9:58 AM PDT. By Dan Avery. When neurologist Oliver Sacks died in 2015, he left behind a legacy of more than a half-century of exploration into the inner workings of the human mind ...
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Sep 4, 2015 · Oliver Sacks, the celebrated neurologic storyteller who died at the end of August at age 82, once described himself as “strongly atheist by disposition.” Sacks could write sensitively about ...
