Isolated Transient Alexia — a migrainous accompaniment — ever had it?

JAMA Neurology abstract: "Alexia as a transient or paroxysmal neurologic event is a rare clinical finding. John Hughlings Jackson made reference to the paroxysmal occurrence of 'word blindness' as a temporary sequela of neuronal exhaustion at an epileptogenic focus.... A transient episode of alexia in the absence of accompanying neurologic deficit is exceedingly rare.... We recently observed a patient who experienced an isolated, transient alexia that appears to have been a migrainous accompaniment...."

I suspect this happened to me. Here's what I was trying to read and could not make any sense of it, and I struggled from all different angles: "The Story of the Foul-Mouthed Parrot Andrew Jackson Once Had" (an episode of a podcast I like: "Boring History for Sleep"). 

Now, I think that's a type of headline that is objectively hard to puzzle out. I encountered another one this morning in the NY Post: "Missouri foster mom accused of trading teen for monkey avoids prison." Something about the sequence "monkey avoids prison" sends your thoughts tripping over the precipice. 

But that "Foul-Mouth Parrot" headline was entirely undecipherable to me. I searched for an entry point: What is "Story"? What is "Andrew"? "Foul"? I couldn't even think of how to begin to pronounce those words or how words work together to mean something. This not-knowing lasted for about 15 minutes, and of course, I queried A.I. about it. That was after Meade had consulted a different A.I.

And I believe all A.I.s will tell you the same thing if you put this story into it — not the story of Andrew Jackson's parrot or the story of the foster mom's monkey — the story of a reading human suddenly completely unable to read. And we did what A.I. told us to do. That's why there was no sunrise photo yesterday. Our sleep was massively disrupted. I had to get my head examined.

ADDED: I omitted a crucial detail that is why I was thinking in terms of a migrainous accompaniment. About an hour before the alexia, I experienced a scintillating scotoma — a glittering arc'd zigzag in my visual field. I've had that twice before, in 2004 and 2014. In 2014, I treated it as nothing, but it felt like a big deal in 2004. I blogged it as "My scotoma" (deliberately evoking "My Sharona"):

"Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers, pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?"

Asks Steven Pinker, on X, as he reads the New Yorker article "Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?"

Pinker answers his own question like this: "Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite.... A common denominator behind Sacks's fabrications was that ineffable, refined intuition can surmount cerebral analysis, which is limited and cramped. It's a theme that runs through some of their other blunders, such as... [t]he many articles by Malcolm Gladwell (like Sacks, a fine essayist) which mixed good reporting with dubious statistical reasoning and misleading claims (e.g., that only practice, not talent, is necessary for achievement, or that IQ above 120 doesn't matter)."

From the New Yorker article, which is by Rachel Aviv: 

"On this date, a thin waning crescent Moon (about 6% illuminated) formed a striking conjunction with Venus and the bright star Regulus in the constellation Leo..."

"... visible in the eastern sky about 40-60 minutes before sunrise for most observers in the Northern Hemisphere. Venus shines at a magnitude of -3.9, making it appear as a dazzling white point of light—far brighter than any star and easily mistaken for a 'dot' close to the Moon's position. This alignment was a highlight of the month's pre-dawn sky, with the trio creating a beautiful triangle-like grouping low on the horizon. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere or a more northerly latitude, the view might have been slightly different, but Venus was the standout object globally."

That's Grok, responding to my question: "What was that white dot next to the moon this morning?

Here's my photo, from 6:12 a.m.:

I fake-raged at Grok: "What do you mean easily mistaken for a 'dot'?! It is a dot. To call it a dot is only to describe how it looks, not to claim it has any particular substance inconsistent with a planet. I assumed it was Venus, but I don't like to say what I don't know, so I said what I did know. It IS a dot! I don't like being told I've made a mistake when I'm actually taking pains to be super-accurate."

Grok abjectly apologized and claimed not to have meant to say I'd made a mistake. Own it, Grok.

ADDED: Grok seemed to want to prove itself by helping me, so I asked what was my genuine next question, a veer away from astronomy and into the topic of writing:

"How is it possible that a disease characterized by coughing, emaciation, relentless diarrhea, fever, and the expectoration of phlegm and blood became not only a sign of beauty, but also a fashionable disease?"

Asks Carolyn Day in "Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease," reviewed by Allison Meier in "How Tuberculosis Symptoms Became Ideals of Beauty in the 19th Century/In Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease, Carolyn A. Day investigates how the fatal symptoms of tuberculosis became entwined with feminine ideals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries" (Hypoallergenic).

It helped that the wasting away of tuberculosis sufferers aligned with existing ideas of attractiveness. The thinness, the ghostly pallor that brought out the veins, the rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, and red lips (really signs of a constant low-grade fever), were both the ideals of beauty for a proper lady, and the appearance of a consumptive on their deathbed. If you didn’t have the disease, you could use makeup to get the pale skin and crimson lips, and wear a dress that slumped your posture....

The perception of a medical problem as beautiful is not an isolated quirk of the Victorian age. We do it today. Look around.

I'll just quote an old post of mine, from 2004, my first year of blogging:

"Brad Pitt believes he suffers from prosopagnosia, a rare 'face blindness' disorder — but 'nobody believes' him...."

"Pitt, who has not been formally diagnosed, worries about appearing 'remote … aloof, inaccessible [and] self-absorbed' while struggling to recognize faces, according to the article.... 'So many people hate me because they think I’m disrespecting them.... Every now and then, someone will give me context, and I’ll say, "Thank you for helping me"'...."

From "Brad Pitt defends ‘face blindness’ condition prosopagnosia: ‘Nobody believes me’" (NY Post).

I've blogged about prosopagnosia twice before. The first time, in 2006, was the first time I'd heard of the condition. It was funny to read that just now, because it's almost identical to what I thought a moment ago, when I read about Brad:

"A person with very severe prosopagnosia may be unable to recognize his spouse, or to pick out his own child in a group of people."

"Jane Goodall also has a certain degree of prosopagnosia. Her problems extend to recognizing chimpanzees as well as people—thus, she says, she is often unable to distinguish individual chimps by their faces. Once she knows a particular chimp well, she ceases to have difficulties; similarly, she has no problem with family and friends. But, she says, 'I have huge problems with people with "average" faces. . . . I have to search for a mole or something. I find it very embarrassing! I can be all day with someone and not know them the next day.'... Face recognition is crucially important for humans, and the vast majority of us are able to identify thousands of faces individually, or to easily pick out familiar faces in a crowd.... People with prosopagnosia... need to be resourceful and inventive in finding strategies for circumventing their deficits: recognizing people by an unusual nose or beard, for example, or by their spectacles or a certain type of clothing. Many prosopagnosics recognize people by voice, posture, or gait; and, of course, context and expectation are paramount—one expects to see one’s students at school, one’s colleagues at the office, and so on. Such strategies, both conscious and unconscious, become so automatic that people with moderate prosopagnosia can remain unaware of how poor their facial recognition actually is, and are startled if it is revealed to them by testing (for example, with photographs that omit ancillary clues like hair or eyeglasses)."

From "Face-Blind/Why are some of us terrible at recognizing faces?" by Oliver Sacks (The New Yorker, August 23, 2010). I'm rereading this today because the NYT ran an article today – "The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian’" — about "the phenomenon of casual Asian-face blindness" that may be holding back Asian-Americans in the workplace. I blogged that here.

The suggestion that there's racism in the inability to recognize faces needs to be handled carefully, because there are 2 forms of discrimination in conflict. It may be discrimination to be bad at recognizing Asian-American coworkers, but vigilance about this human frailty may amount to a failure to accommodate the disabled — those with prosopagnosia. Quite aside from the specific disability, we're all on a spectrum when it comes to facial recognition. Many of us are bad at it, and some people are fantastic at it. Be careful about throwing accusations of racism around in this area of radically diverse ability.

Let's say you're multitasking, reading the news on screen, eating strawberry yogurt, and sticking a gold earring into your pierced ear.

You drop the little gold piece that goes on in back — the push back. You don't hear it hit the desk, but maybe it fell on the carpeted floor. But it's most likely in the yogurt. You don't see it on top of the yogurt, but is it down in the yogurt? Do you get a flashlight and carefully search the desk and floor area first or do you proceed to eat the yogurt? If you eat the yogurt in the hope of finding the push back, carefully mashing the goo in your mouth to make sure that's not the mouthful with the little gold thing in it, do you think Surely, it's near the top? 

That's going to interfere with the enjoyment of the yogurt, you know. You could get up and find a sieve and run the bowlful of yogurt into a second bowl from which you could savor your breakfast, undistracted by intra-mouth straining. But you don't want the metallic, sieved version of strawberry yogurt. And you're lazy. Not lazy enough to have skipped the step of getting the flashlight and searching the floor and the desk. Just lazy enough not to sieve the yogurt.

As you eat mouthful after mouthful, do you maintain a uniform carefulness or do you get to thinking it's not in the yogurt? When you arrive at the last spoonful, do you have any hope that the little thingie sank all the way to the bottom? If you're trying to imagine the viscosity of the substance, this is not Greek yogurt — that pasty stuff — but old-time yogurt, and it had been spooned out into a bowl and stirred up. 

It was in the last spoonful! And I had become a bit lackadaisical. And yet, I did not swallow it. I reacted with alarm as if I'd come close to swallowing it, but I hadn't. I got it. How did it sink to the bottom of the yogurt in the bowl?

But I know gold is heavy. I've remembered that gold is heavier than lead ever since I read this passage almost 20 years ago:

 

That's from "Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood" by Oliver Sacks.

Are you one of those people who eat the same thing every day?

My question is prompted by an article I'm reading — from 2015 about Oliver Sacks:

“I’m a compulsive eater. I can’t have much food in the fridge.” Sacks has eaten the same meals every day for years: oatmeal or Grape-Nuts for breakfast, and canned fish for lunch and dinner. When I ask about this, Sacks stands and shuffles off toward the kitchen, “Stay put,” he instructs. He returns a minute later to methodically stack on the table between us seven tins of sardines, and a half-finished plastic-wrapped package of canned, pickled herring. “I keep a small stock,” he explains. “I don’t want to be bothered to make a choice. Lunch or dinner usually takes about 30 seconds, and I eat standing up. And sometimes reading a book.” If he goes out to eat with friends, Sacks will often choose the first thing he sees on the menu. “It saves time,” he explains.

I ran across that article yesterday as we were discussing the sense of smell in this post about a man who had anosmia and then regained his sense of smell and experienced smell as much more intense than it is for a person who'd never been smell deprived. Commenters brought up dogs, and I wanted to talk about the Oliver Sacks essay, "The Dog Beneath the Skin," a chapter in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," about a man who takes drugs that leave him with a heightened sense of smell and the feeling that it was like being a dog.

I felt surprised to see in that 2015 article that the dog-man in question was Sacks himself, a fact he'd chosen to hide when he published "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." ("I’m, um… less – less shy now. I think partly I’m at a distance from these things. They were 40 years ago. And I don’t think it’s sensationalism or exhibitionism for its own sake – so much as the fact that I am basically constituted the same as everybody else, and I will get an inside take, as well as a scientific one.") This revelation is in Sacks's memoir, "On the Move: A Life," which I've read, so I should not have been surprised. I mean, I know I forget most of what I read, but I do think that having read something once ought to keep you from feeling surprised to see it when it comes up again. It should be more of a feeling of oh, yeah, I'd forgotten that.

There are levels of forgetting, I realize. Let's say you encounter, once again, a fact you've have heard before. Level 1: Oh, yes, I remember. (You forgot only in the sense that you had no reason to call the fact to mind, but it looks completely familiar). Level 2: Oh, I'd forgotten that. (You remember that you've seen it before.) Level 3: I don't think I've ever seen that before. (You may have seen it, but you don't remember.) Level 4: I'm sure I've never seen that before. (You seem to remember that you have never known it. This may be based on reasoning that it's the sort of thing that if you'd heard it before, you would remember.)

But back to my original question. If you are one of these people who eat the same thing every day, is it that you worry (or know) that if you allowed yourself choice, you'd go wild? Sacks was capable of taking a lot of drugs and radically changing his way of being...

He experienced a certain impulse to sniff and touch everything (‘It wasn’t really real until I felt it and smelt it’) but suppressed this, when with others, lest he seem inappropriate. Sexual smells were exciting and increased—but no more so, he felt, than food smells and other smells. Smell pleasure was intense—smell displeasure, too—but it seemed to him less a world of mere pleasure and displeasure than a whole aesthetic, a whole judgment, a whole new significance, which surrounded him. ‘It was a world overwhelmingly concrete, of particulars,’ he said, ‘a world overwhelming in immediacy, in immediate significance.’ Somewhat intellectual before, and inclined to reflection and abstraction, he now found thought, abstraction and categorisation, somewhat difficult and unreal, in view of the compelling immediacy of each experience. (From "The Dog Beneath the Skin.")

If you're the kind of person for whom opening doors has immense consequence, you might keep a lot of doors shut.

"When you put a hat and sunglasses on it, it kind of takes the raunchiness out of it."

"I want to raise the bar for dick pics. If you’re going to send one, at least make me laugh. Put some effort into it."

[Soraya] Doolbaz says her husband is very supportive of the idea and dick pics in general, noting that they dated long-distance for a while. Before that, she says she received enough dick pics to give her plenty of inspiration for the project: “Oh my God, when I was single, I would get a ton of them,” she says. “And my friends would get them too and we would show them to each other.”

That's from a Village Voice piece published in 2015. I found that as a result of searches inspired by discussion in the comments to yesterday's "Questionable Artwork Café," where I'd invited people to impose political analysis on a Thomas Hart Benton painting of a farm scene. Participating in the comments myself, I said:

Huge vagina symbol in foreground.

Empowering for women or insulting?

Horse is big phallic symbol, but far from adequate to that huge vagina. Also the harnessing of the horse is emphasized. Is that empowering for women?

And after I got a little pushback for seeing a vagina symbol, I added:

Freud thought a hat was a vagina symbol.

And then the fanciful notion:

That suggests that when a man is having sex with a woman, he's wearing her.

Not wearing her out. Wearing her like she's a very elaborate hat.

Robt C brought up one of my all-time favorite books:

If what Althouse says about sex and hats is true, it give a whole new meaning to Oliver Sacks' book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

I said:

Suddenly, everything makes sense!

The man wasn't wrong at all. He was right and everyone else was wrong. And that's the way of the world, if we could only see things from a different point.

As Bob Dylan sang: "We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view."

Meanwhile, CWJ had said, "Well there are pussy hats after all." But those are hats for your head. To get the humor — and it's my favorite form of humor — you have to picture the ridiculous big-and-small foolery. The penis is wearing that hat. I figured somebody had already made a project out of putting little hats on penises, and I was right. The big-and-small element or humor is not present in the art project shown at The Village Voice. Soraya Doolbaz — great name! — makes penis-sized clothing, including hats, and dresses real penises up for posing in photographs. In the woman-as-hat notion that amused me, the "head" for the hat is much smaller than the head in a normal hat, but the hat is much larger than the normal hat, so you've got a very radical disproportion.

As I said in a post back in 2009, I have long been aware I am usually amused by humor about the size of things:

We were talking about the expression "postage stamp lawn," that is, a very small lawn, perhaps the size of an area rug. But what if there really were a postage stamp the size of an area rug? That would be a huge postage stamp. Ha ha. Imagine the size of the envelope you'd put it on. Okay. That to me is hilarious, and it reminded me of the joke I found so funny — decades ago — that I laughed so hard the teller of the joke got mad at me for laughing so much. I was cutting the joker's hair — I used to think I could do haircuts and acted upon that belief — and I noticed a bright red dot on the top of his head — the size of a pimple, but not a pimple — and not something he'd ever have noticed. I said, "What's this red dot on top of your head?" He said, "That's my Santa Claus hat!"

I have ever since regarded that as the funniest spontaneous remark I've ever heard, and maybe that will give you some insight into how I feel about the woman-as-hat notion that amused me so much yesterday. Or maybe you have the same taste in big-and-small jokes and you're laughing too. Click the "big and small" tag for more insight into Althouse's big-and-small fetish. In any case, I hope you like the photographs of Soraya Doolbaz.

And apologies to all of you who are thinking I waited nearly 4 hours for the 3d post of the day and this — this!! — is what I get? This post, half written, spurred a real-world conversation that took up nearly the entire interval. So that makes me think if you'll find plenty to say in the comments.

A New Yorker article that begins "A year ago, I lost my best friend, Oliver Sacks" uses Sacks as a way to attack Donald Trump.

Any other dead heroes we could dig up to opine on the transitory politics of the day?

Jeez, this is disgusting. I loved — I love — Oliver Sacks. I'm very sad he's gone, and I wanted to share that feeling with the writer of what looks like a sensitive piece on the wonderful author. The title is "A YEAR WITHOUT OLIVER SACKS" and we see a photo of Sacks — standing in a city rooftop garden — with the caption "Oliver Sacks’ greatest gift was sensitivity—seeing, feeling, and sketching what the rest of us had never even noticed."

Okay, yes... sensitivity... that greatest gift... and then the name "Trump" — why???!! — appears in the first paragraph:

For many years, each week, Oliver and I would cruise north on the West Side bike path at sunrise. Alone, our bicycles a few inches apart, we spoke about everything and anything, but mostly about interesting patients, natural history, and food. His voice was soft, and I struggled to hear his words. But his volume and pedalling cadence always accelerated when the massive TRUMP PLACE buildings appeared to our right. He detested the giant protuberances that unpleasantly punctuated the view from our bike seats, and often cursed them.

So... he didn't like big buildings? But you've got him cursing the capitalized name Trump. Did you stop there, you trusted friend of the ultra-sensitive writer? No. We also have, after some nice anecdotes:

He would have been crushed by the rise of Donald Trump and the electoral success of Brexit. Intolerance and fear-mongering, he knew, are rudders that steer societies in dangerous directions....

You admire his sensitivity and then instead of respecting it, and leaving him with only what he actually thought and wrote and said, you — the "you" is  Orrin Devinsky, director of NYU Langone’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center — appropriate it as a platform for your own political opinions.

I read Oliver Sacks's memoir, "On the Move: A Life," and he showed strikingly little interest in politics. Here's the closest I can come to finding something political in that book:

I did not seek American citizenship and was happy to have a green card, to be accounted a “resident alien.” This accorded with how I felt, at least for much of the time— a friendly, observant alien noting everything around me but without civic responsibilities such as voting or jury duty or need to affiliate myself with the country’s policies or politics.

That's the politics of being nonpolitical. I appreciate that and I know what he means. I have that feeling too — a friendly, observant alien noting everything around me.... Well, maybe not always so friendly.

"Swearing in front of women and children, and making fun of someone who doesn’t accept a duel... Singing 'The Star Spangled Banner' in a nontraditional or disrespectful manner..."

"Requiring any able-bodied man over the age of 18 to respond to the state Department of Natural Resources to help out in cases of emergency....  Prohibiting certain endurance contests, such as walk-a-thons... Making it a crime for a doctor to keep or display the remains of a deformed human being or a 'human monstrosity,' except for scientific purposes for medical classes...."

Michigan repeals some old laws.

ADDED: That bit about requiring able-bodied men to serve in an emergency reminded me of a passage in Oliver Sacks, "On the Move: A Life" describing his experience in Canada in 1960:

Having traveled by plane and train, I decided to complete my westward journey by hitchhiking— and almost immediately got conscripted for firefighting. I wrote to my parents,

"I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers."

"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and an adventure."

From "4 Oliver Sacks Quotes on Gratitude," which extracts quotes from a new Oliver Sacks book — just right for Thanksgiving — titled "Gratitude."

It contains the quotes of others, such as Samuel Beckett saying "I wouldn’t go as far as that" when somebody said "Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?"

A last article from Oliver Sacks: "Urge."

In the New York Review of Books. Excerpt:

Walter, previously a moderate eater, developed a ravenous appetite. “He started to gain weight,” his wife later told me, “and his pants changed three sizes in six months. His appetite was out of control. He would get up in the middle of the night and eat an entire bag of cookies, or a block of cheese with a large box of crackers.”

“I ate everything in sight,” Walter said. “If you put a car on the table, I would have eaten it.”...

Even more disquieting was the development of an insatiable sexual appetite. “He wanted to have sex all the time,” his wife said....

He's caught with child pornography and a criminal prosecution ensues: "At the end of the trial, the judge agreed that Walter could not be held accountable for having Klüver-Bucy syndrome. But he was culpable...."

Oliver Sacks has died.

We knew he was dying. He wrote about it. (Eloquently, as always.) But it's very sad to see that he has departed. He gave us so many fascinating books over the decades. What a terrible loss!

Here's the NYT obituary, which — amid the good — includes the criticism:

Dr. Sacks began his medical career as a researcher but gave up early.... “I lost samples,” he told an interviewer in 2005. “I broke machines. Finally they said to me: ‘Sacks, you’re a menace. Get out. Go see patients. They matter less.’ ”...

Reviewers [of his books] praised his empathy and his graceful prose. Scientists could be dismissive, however, complaining that his clinical tales put too much emphasis on the tales and not enough on the clinical. A London neuroscientist, Ray Dolan, told The Guardian in 2005: “Whether Dr. Sacks has provided any scientific insights into the neurological conditions he has written about in his numerous books is open to question. I have always felt uncomfortable about this side of this work, and especially the tendency for Dr. Sacks to be an ever-present dramatis persona.”

In an otherwise laudatory review of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” in The New York Times Book Review, the neuropsychologist John C. Marshall took issue with what he saw as Dr. Sacks’s faux-naïve presentation (“He would have us believe that an experienced neurologist could fail to have read anything about many of the standard syndromes”), and called his blend of medicine and philosophy “insightful, compassionate, moving and, on occasion, simply infuriating.”

More damningly, the disability-rights activist Tom Shakespeare accused Dr. Sacks of exploiting the people he wrote about, calling him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career.”

ADDED: "I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying.... I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers...."

"To hold ancient books, incunabula, in my own hands was a new experience for me..."

"... I particularly adored Conrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium (1551), richly illustrated (it had Albrecht Dürer’s famous drawing of a rhinoceros), and there, too, that I fell in love with all the works of Sir Thomas Browne— his Religio Medici, his Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (The Quincunciall Lozenge). It was in the stacks that I saw all of Darwin’s works in their original editions. How absurd some of these were, but how magnificent the language! And if Browne’s classical magniloquence became too much at times, one could switch to the lapidary cut and thrust of Swift, all of whose works, of course, were there in their original editions."

Writes Oliver Sacks, in his memoir "On the Move: A Life," which I'm reading in Kindle form, and,  reading on my iPad, I can Google my way into things that jump out, like that rhinoceros. There's a whole Wikipedia article, "Dürer's Rhinoceros":

The image was based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist of an Indian rhinoceros that had arrived in Lisbon earlier that year. Dürer never saw the actual rhinoceros, which was the first living example seen in Europe since Roman times... Dürer's... depicts an animal with hard plates that cover its body like sheets of armour, with a gorget at the throat, a solid-looking breastplate, and rivets along the seams. He places a small twisted horn on its back, and gives it scaly legs and saw-like rear quarters... Despite its anatomical inaccuracies, Dürer's woodcut became very popular in Europe and was copied many times in the following three centuries. It was regarded by Westerners as a true representation of a rhinoceros into the late 18th century.

I'm also fascinated by that word "incunabula," which the OED defines as "1. The earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything" and "2. Books produced in the infancy of the art of printing; spec. those printed before 1500." The literal original meaning is: swaddling-clothes.

"A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky 'powdered with stars” (in Milton’s words)..."

"... such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death. I told my friends Kate and Allen, 'I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.' 'We’ll wheel you outside,' they said."

Writes Oliver Sacks, who is dying.

I almost certainly will not see my polonium (84th) birthday, nor would I want any polonium around, with its intense, murderous radioactivity. But then, at the other end of my table — my periodic table — I have a beautifully machined piece of beryllium (element 4) to remind me of my childhood, and of how long ago my soon-to-end life began.

Oliver Sacks writes about Spalding Gray's brain injury and suicide.

Gray was in a car accident, in 2001, that drove bone fragments into his right frontal lobe and, it seems, changed him profoundly:

It was while he was in the hospital in Ireland following his hip surgery, he told me, that he finalized a deal to sell the old house. He later came to feel that he was “not himself” at the time, that “witches, ghosts, and voodoo” had “commanded” him to do it....

Three years later, he was still obsessing about selling the house. Asked if he had other recurrent thoughts:

He said yes: he often thought about his mother and the first twenty-six years of his life. It was when he was twenty-six that his mother, who had been intermittently psychotic since he was ten, fell into a self-torturing, remorseful state, focussed on the selling of her family house. Unable to endure her torment, she had committed suicide....

"On day ten, I turned a corner— I felt awful, as usual, in the morning, but a completely different person in the afternoon."

"This was delightful, and wholly unexpected: there was no intimation, beforehand, that such a transformation was about to happen," writes Oliver Sacks, describing the aftermath of treatment for metastatic liver cancer.

How much of this was a reestablishment of balance in the body; how much an autonomic rebound after a profound autonomic depression; how much other physiological factors; and how much the sheer joy of writing, I do not know. But my transformed state and feeling were, I suspect, very close to what Nietzsche experienced after a period of illness and expressed so lyrically in The Gay Science:

Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened — the gratitude of a convalescent — for convalescence was unexpected…. The rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again.

"Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts."

Writes Oliver Sacks, who learned a few weeks ago that he is dying.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment....

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

ADDED: Oliver Sacks — who "goes home and eats fish with rice - every evening," "doesn't go out much," and has "a dread of social occasions" — "has never married, and has apparently been celibate for years."

In the comments to this post, Chris Low Chris Low points us to this fabulous picture: "Oliver Sacks on a motorcycle in 1961."

"[I]f Amoeba were a large animal, so as to come in the everyday experience of human beings, its behaviour would at once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and pain..."

"... of hunger, desire, and the like, on precisely the same basis as we attribute these things to the dog," wrote Herbert Spencer Jennings in "Behavior of the Lower Organisms," quoted by Oliver Sacks, in an article titled "The Mental Life of Plants and Worms, Among Others," where I learned, that the last book Charles Darwin ever wrote was about worms, "The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms: with Observations on Their Habits."

Sacks says:

Jennings’s vision of a highly sensitive, dog-size Amoeba is almost cartoonishly the opposite of Descartes’s notion of dogs as so devoid of feelings that one could vivisect them without compunction, taking their cries as purely “reflex” reactions of a quasi-mechanical kind.