” bounces off the title of the essay that Sacks published in The New York Times on Feb. 19, 2015 , days after he’d received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. It‘s a deceptively plain title. For Sacks, in his impish way, was suggesting that his own life, if you looked at it closely enough, might bear more than a passing resemblance to the idiosyncratic and richly freakish lives he chronicled in his case-study portraits that were really a form of wide-eyed literary biography.
You’d think a psychoanalytical neurologist with that kind of humanity and fortitude would be a relatively centered person, one with a rock-solid sense of boundaries. Far from it. At the time of the “Awakenings” experience, Sacks was emerging from his own slow-motion semi-catastrophe, a period of liberation that was also one of staggering self-destruction. Born in England in 1933, he’d come to the U.S.
Oliver never asked again, and part of the teasing mystery of “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life” is that the movie, like Sacks himself, refuses to pin its subject down to anything as earthly as a diagnosis, because that would reduce him. He had enough torment about his sexuality that, after trying and failing to find a partner , he became celibate for 35 years.
LALIGERA 🏆