Oliver Sacks’s essays in Gratitude full of words from the wise

Oliver Sacks’s posthumously published Gratitude may be a small package but it’s full of big-heartedness.

Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks. Picture: Elena Seibret

Oliver Sacks’s posthumously published Gratitude (Picador, $22.99) is an ideal Christmas stocking filler — a 50-page hardback, it’s the perfect size — but I would be recommending it at any time of year.

It may be a small package but it’s full of the big-heartedness that made the celebrated neurologist such a well-loved writer. Sacks died on August 30, aged 82, three months after publishing his revealing memoir On the Move: A Life. The four essays in Gratitude were written in his final two years and include the instant classic My Own Life, published in The New York Times soon after he was told a returned cancer would kill him sooner rather than later.

For me the wisest and most moving part of this essay comes in the passage from which the title of this book is drawn. Sacks considers the deaths of contemporaries — and here I think of Graham Greene’s melancholy mornings scratching dead friends from his address book — and realises: “My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they leave holes that can not be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and natural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to die his own death. I can not pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.’’ He goes on to say how wonderful his life has been, how privileged he has been to be “a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet’’. As contemplations of death go, this one is life-affirming.

The first essay, Mercury, written when Sacks was turning 80, is another marvel, a meditation on ageing that will make you want to live as long as possible, and to live every day you have. “At 80,’’ he writes, “one can have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age.
I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the fractious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.’’ Reading that, I felt slightly less terrified of growing older.

When it comes to novels, which are the best of the British? I was asked this question by BBC.com’s Jane Ciabattari recently (along with 80 or so other non-British critics). The results of this “away team” poll to determine the 100 Greatest British Novels have been rolled out over the past week, with the top 10 due on Monday (bbc.com/culture). We were asked to nominate our No 1 and nine others in any order. I decided to narrow the vast field by thinking of novels I loved reading, ones that had no element of chore about them.

My top vote went to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the nine runners-up being Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case, VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, AS Byatt’s Possession and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. When
I asked chief critic Geordie Williamson for his top 10, we had just one in common, The Enigma of Arrival. Geordie’s No 1 is George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Quote of the week: “Maybe because I can’t dance. Maybe because writing involves the Puritan’s requisites of pain, frustration, self-loathing and (guilty) satisfaction.’’ Don Watson, in response to the question Why do you write?, in Australian Book Review’s Open Page column.