EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE

First Loves and Last Tales

By Oliver Sacks

The word “Oneirism” is more than just an obscure exception to the “i” before “e” rhymelet. It also exemplifies the exceptionally advanced and sometimes stymying lexical breadth of Oliver Sacks’s writing — never more challenging than in this last, posthumous book, a collection of previously uncollected and/or unpublished essays. (“Oneiric,” in case you were wondering, means “related to dreams or dreaming.”) The book’s many other linguistic rarities include “festination,” “bradykinesia,” “metanoia,” “achromatopsia.” Occasionally Sacks pauses for a definition. More often he doesn’t.

This is a good thing. Many of these words are specific to Sacks’s medical specialty, neurology, as chronicled in his often best-selling books (“The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” “A Leg to Stand On,” “Awakenings,” this last adapted into a film). Their meanings could have been spelled out, perhaps, but often only with condescendingly grade-school diction. In other words, this obscure terminology serves to honor the reader. If you don’t know our meanings, these terms imply, trust us that we are carefully chosen, as we trust you to look us up.

“Everything in Its Place”: a lame title. Especially since the topics here are actually a wonderfully odd lot, despite the worthy effort to group them into sections — “First Loves,” “Clinical Tales” and “Life Continues.” Why not name the whole book after its essay “Anybody Out There?,” about the possibility of extraterrestrial life (“It is not clear whether life has to ‘advance,’ whether evolution must take place”). Or after “Summer of Madness,” an account of the thrilling but dangerous euphoria of a young woman named Sally who, in the manic stage of her manic depression, “breaks.” After haranguing strangers in the street, shaking them, demanding their attention, she suddenly runs headlong into a stream of traffic, convinced that she can bring it to a halt by sheer willpower.

As it happens, this essay provides Sacks the chance to address a truly serious literary issue — one that troubled Sally’s father, Michael Greenberg, as he considered writing about his daughter’s illness. (He finally did, more than a decade after this onset of her mania, in an excellent, unflinching memoir called “Hurry Down Sunshine.”) It troubles Sacks, too: “The question of ‘telling,’ of publishing detailed accounts of patients’ lives, their vulnerabilities, their illness, is a matter of great moral delicacy, fraught with perils and pitfalls of every sort.”