“I had no room now for this fear, or for any other fear, because I was filled to the brim with music.” — Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks is gone. My greatest living hero is no longer a living hero.

For his uniquely sharp and sympathetic mind, Dr. Oliver Sacks has long held a special place in my heart. Back in the mid 90s, I wrote book reviews for the Greenville, SC edition of Creative Loafing. One of the first books I reviewed was Oliver Sack’s The Island of the Colorblind. In that book, he recounts his visits with the Pingelap people of the Caroline Islands, among whom many are not only color blind but also sensitive to light an unable to see fine detail. In examining their culture, Sacks brought the same fine-tuned eye, the same sense of fascination and wonder that Darwin must have brought to his exploration of the Galápagos Islands.

I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with Sacks then. I’d seen the lovely 1990 film Awakenings, in which Robin Williams plays the character based on Oliver Sacks. Though the film was based on Sacks’ book of the same name, we learned years later that it got elements of his life tragically wrong. Oliver Sacks wasn’t a shy man who finally works up the nerve to ask out a pretty nurse for a date. He was a somewhat closeted gay man who remained largely celibate for much of his life and who long wished he could rid himself of his homosexuality. It took him many years to apply the same cool yet compassionate and accepting judgment he applied to so much of humanity to his own orientation.

As I noted in my review of The Island of the Colorblind then, “Much of the joy in reading Sacks lies in witnessing the sheer glee and childlike wonder with which he approaches every escapade.” The book confirmed to me that “the characteristic of Sacks which endears him to readers the most is his love for humanity: he is capable of discovering and describing beauty in any person, no matter how seemingly disturbed, disfigured, or impaired.”

In An Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks writes about people suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. One individual he studied was a surgeon whose symptoms miraculously disappeared when he went into surgery or, almost unbelievably, when he flew a plane. In a passage I’ll never forget, Sacks describes seeing the same man lying on the floor ticcing and kicking as he spoke conversationally with his colleagues. Yet Sacks’ perspective is never one of horror, never condescension, never does he gape at the man. Instead his attitude of one of thoughtful consideration and … wonder.

Since first encountering his work in the 1990s, my respect for Dr. Sacks’ perspective has never wavered. In fact, I’ve long considered his approach to the world an ideal one for any human being to employ — even as I often fail to adopt it myself. I’ve long considered him a hero. A hero among heroes, in fact. For as long as other heroes have faded away, as long as I’ve discovered their foibles, as some sloughed off as mere youthful infatuations, Oliver Sacks was always there.

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Looking around you, who do you see in the news right now? Who are the prominent figures? Who’s trending on social media? You’ll find some good and talented people, sure. But few of them look like Oliver Sacks. On the other hand, consider Donald Trump. At this moment, Trump has seized the imagination of millions with his belligerence, with his opulent and defensive ego, with his bilious and incoherent diatribes — all in lieu of thoughtful observation and commentary. Oliver Sacks was the anti-Trump. Trump is (outlandishly) running for President. Oliver Sacks in not the person who runs for President. He’s not the person you elect as President. Trump denies the humanity of many. Sacks saw the humanity in all. Ask many people, however, to name their heroes and I doubt “Oliver Sacks” is a name which springs readily to mind. Yet humanity needs many more heroes like Oliver Sacks if we’re to survive and improve as a species.

(So seldom, in fact, does a mind as vibrant as Oliver Sacks’ take on a position of governmental leadership that when they do, they’re almost the exception that proves the rule. Think of the playwright and activist Vaclav Havel, perhaps.)

***

A young Oliver Sacks on the cover of his recent memoir On the Move

Though many close to him apparently knew of his orientation, just this year upon publishing his memoir On the Move, Sacks finally came out to the wider world as a gay man. And just within the last decade, happily, he allowed himself to fall in love with the writer and photographer Billy Hayes. After a period exploring his sexual identity as a younger man, however, Sacks remained celibate for decades. At 21 and home from college, he came out to his father and asked him never to tell his mother. However, the next day his mother descended on him, enraged and spouting “Deuteronomical curses, horrible judgmental accusations.” “You are an abomination,” she said. “I wish you had never been born.” This is the personal history the kind, gentle-minded Oliver Sacks lived with for decades. Of course, Sacks grew up in a world, which wasn’t (which isn’t) nearly as tolerant of nor as inquisitive about human diversity as he was. In this way, he was our greatest living role model. For banishing fear. For eschewing binary thinking. For embracing curiosity. For patient examination. For understanding that everything we humans encounter need not fit into neat, palatable categories.

I’m certainly glad “Ollie” — as he referred to himself — lived long enough to see marriage equality become a reality. It must have given him hope for the future of the human tribe, even as he lived through the inevitable and irrational backlash we’re seeing even today.

If part of his life was stunted for so long, Oliver Sacks certainly showed us how to embrace life in every other facet of his existence — even upon announcing the life-ending spread of his cancer. “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me,” he wrote. “I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.”

And so he did. Living and writing up until the moment of his death.

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Oliver Sacks was relentlessly curious, eternally compassionate. A beautiful, restless mind. In an age where we often elevate the superficial and reserve our admiration for the rich and powerful, his was a soul which embraced life in all its multivariate forms and beauty. He was the one human being I’m aware of who came closest of actually embracing the Jewish theologian Martin Buber’s philosophy of I and Thou when considering his fellow human beings. Basically, Buber espoused I-Thou relationships. In an I-Thou relationship, you consider another human equal to oneself. Whereas, an I-It relationship treats other humans as less than equal, as objects. Using this framework— even from a secular perspective — it’s not difficult to imagine how all sorts of intolerance, bigotry, discrimination and even wars arise, when we humans indulge the I-It attitude. Which we seem to do in spades.

Sacks was raised in an orthodox Jewish home, though he called himself a “an old Jewish atheist.” Were he a Catholic, I imagine he’d be a worthy nominee for sainthood. Alas, however, despite all his efforts to help us understand the human animal, despite his meticulous work in his modest way over decades without thought of reward, this secular saint will never be sainted. I don’t think the Catholic Church will change so much in my life time as to offer up a non-believing gay Jewish man for sainthood. But if you’re looking for a human being deserving of it, look no further than Oliver Sacks.

Rest in peace, dear Doctor Sacks. You’ve earned it.

@stribs