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.
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