Hallucinations doesn’t represent a classic example of “late style” of the kind Adorno discerned in Beethoven-alienated, defiant-or as Edward Said developed the notion, an artistic lateness conceived not in terms of resolution or closure but rather as a matter of “intransigence, difficulty and contradiction.” There is no diminishment of Sacks’s warmth, nothing sere or withered, no turn against the earlier vision of the human brain as near-endlessly able to compensate for all but the most devastating losses. Unlike, say, memory loss, which usually can’t be described by the sufferer and is best documented by an observer, hallucinations are invisible and inaudible to outsiders and for the most part have to be conveyed by the person who experienced them. Sacks always places the highest value on the testimony of patients, but for hallucinations this tendency is especially strong, because words and testimony provide the only means of access. The book builds a natural history out of first-person accounts about a range of visual and aural hallucinations: the phantasms people have encountered while on drugs, on the verge of sleep, in sensory-deprivation tanks, or walking down the street. This pressure creates the drama of Hallucinations, such as it is. As Sacks approaches eighty, indeed, a feeling of urgency clings to his writing, an acknowledgment of the possibility that sufficient time may not remain for him to explore the tranches of the human brain not yet mapped in his lucid prose. That sense of vocation has since scarcely dimmed. And then a very loud internal voice said, ‘You silly bugger! You’re the man!’” D., all of them good men but none of them with that mix of science and humanism that was so powerful in Liveing. Asking himself who might be the Liveing of the 1960s, Sacks heard a “disingenuous clutter of names”: “I thought of Dr. The book seemed to have all the richness and humanity lacking in the academic articles that constituted modern medical literature. ![]() On one striking occasion, as the drug took effect, he began reading an 1873 book on migraines by the physician Edward Liveing, his absorption taking on a sublime beauty and intensity he moved steadily through its five hundred pages, unsure at times whether he was reading or writing the volume. ![]() One of the most amazing passages in the book describes Sacks’s experimentation with amphetamines. It was during this period that Sacks’s vocation as a writer would emerge, and the theme of writing as refuge and remedy will return in Hallucinations as a refrain. ![]() In New York, he suffered acute delirium tremens after the sudden cessation of a serious chloral hydrate habit, experiencing intense hallucinations and fending off panic only by writing a clear, almost clinical account of what he saw. In London, after extracting morphine from the drug cabinet in his parents’ home office and injecting it, he enjoyed a spectacular hallucination of the Battle of Agincourt on the sleeve of his dressing gown, remaining immersed in the vision for more than twelve hours the span of time lost sufficiently alarmed Sacks that he gave up opiates altogether. Sacks’s weekend drug experimentation escalated: a cocktail of amphetamine, LSD, and cannabis let him see true indigo, a color unknown in nature, while morning-glory seeds gave him the conviction that a visitor, in actuality a psychoanalyst colleague of Sacks’s physician parents, was in fact only a replica of the woman he knew. (In a fascinating footnote, Sacks observes that on the basis of this anecdote, and more particularly on the account of the spider’s “philosophical tendencies and Russellian voice,” his friend Thomas Eisner, the great entomologist, claimed to have been able to identify the particular species Sacks saw.) Other hallucinations experienced that day included the sound of a helicopter whirring above-Sacks believed it contained his parents on a surprise visit from London-and a conversation with a spider that asked Sacks whether he believed that Bertrand Russell truly exploded Frege’s paradox. ![]() Their presence, and indeed the entire conversation, had been “completely invented” in Sacks’s brain. Sacks cooked ham and eggs, chatting with them as he stood in the kitchen and they sat in the living room, then put breakfast on a tray and carried it to them, only to find that they had never been there. A day on Artane, a synthetic drug allied to belladonna that in large doses can induce delirium, featured a visit from his friends Jim and Kathy. In the best chapter in Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks describes his own history of experimentation with drugs during his thirties, when he was a neurology resident in Southern California on a quest to satisfy an obsessive curiosity about the neurochemical background of dreams and hallucinations.
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