Extreme Immoderation in All My Passions

A Man One Might Like to Share an Evening With... Reading His Autobiography.....

 When I see this photo of Wolf Sacks, I imagine myself there in Greenwich Village, just to the side of his BMW motorcycle.... perhaps accompanying him on his 1000- mile weekend trips to The Grand Canyon from the California Coast-- at 100 mph, full-throttle-the-whole-way, in the desert moonlight. (He often quoted T. E. Lawrence's "The Road"-- "A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess...")

And there I (wish I) am, just out of the frame of the second photo, traipsing around Machu Picchu with Oliver, then sitting in quiet contemplation (we are both introverts), journals in hand. Upon learning that his cancer would kill him shortly, he wrote, " I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have given something in return. I have read and traveled and thought and written…"

 

Of course, these photographs are of the same man: Dr. Oliver Wolf Sacks, (1933-2015). I have enjoyed poring over his recollections and thoughts, perhaps as much as he enjoyed exploring others' minds. One writer described him as an "intrepid psychonaut."

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report:
“Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” 
He went too far his entire life, and I am so glad he did.

Most know him from his experiments with L-Dopa, and the movie "Awakenings" that was based on those experiences. What I must respect him for most, is that when life dealt him an unexpected blow, he researched the topic and wrote another book. He shattered his leg, running off a cliff in Norway to escape a charging bull, and wrote A Leg to Stand On. He began to experience hearing loss and wrote Musicophelia. He was diagnosed with cancer in one eye, and wrote, The Mind's Eye. He wrote:

 "To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment." And it is.

Something enjoyable becomes doubly enjoyable when shared. I am one of those people who loves to read silently, but bursts out intermittently "Oh, listen to this..."

So, I must recommend and share a few wonderful points from Sacks' autobiography, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Reading it was a pleasure. Writing about it doubles my joy. Discussion in comments, or person, would be (sigh) exquisite. So, if you wish to to peruse this strange and marvelous book, prepare to have your chemistry knowledge stretched. And definitely look for these memorable parts:

Rubber smells like human skin (or vice-versa).

Sepia photographs were colored with cuttlefish ink.  Young Oliver once collected nearly 100 cuttlefish and attempted to preserve them in alcohol in a friend's home. The cuttlefish fermented and exploded, rendering the house unlivable for a time. 

He quotes Albert Einstein:"Never lose a holy curiosity."

Chemical names used to be quite romantic: butter of antimony, jovial bezoar, sugar of lead, fuming liquor of Libavious, flowers of zinc

(zinc oxide nanoparticles)

His epiphany upon seeing the Periodic Table.. "the table was a sort of cosmic staircase or a Jacob's ladder, going up to, coming down from, a Pythagorean heaven." He could scarcely sleep that night, thinking of it as a "crytogram without a key, a marvelous secret" "that reflected a deep order in nature."

He speaks of shoe shops in England that had x-ray machines that would let you see your foot bones within the shoes. And how dentists often lost fingers, exposed to radiation from holding the x-ray films in patients' mouths so often, and how his uncle had malignant warts on his hands from experimenting with x-rays. Also, there was a sudden jump in sales of lead lined underwear when x-rays were first publicly announced.

 

Along the same line, there were many "fluorine martyrs." Working with fluorine was so dangerous, that many of the early scientists who tried to isolate the element accidentally burned and  lethally poisoned themselves....

 

The Curies' lab, as they worked with uranium, glowed at night. Marie Curie's notebooks are still too radioactive to be handled.

 

Chlorine can safely be mixed with hydrogen under red light, in a darkroom. It will explode under white light.

 

 His uncles introduced him to a spinthariscope.  Using the the magnifying eyepiece, one can see atoms from a tiny speck of radium decay in bright flashes against a fluorescent screen... like tiny shooting stars.

 

As a child, and again as an older gentleman, walking the streets of New York, he carries a spectroscope in his pocket, looking at the city lights. As shy as he was, he once entered a Gay Bar in New York and shouted, "Stop talking about sex! Look at this!" And everyone did. 
Please clear your mind of any jokes that begin, "Is that a spectroscope in your pocket, or..."

 

He ends the book by talking about the end of his boyhood adventures in chemistry and how in school, his passion died. "Now, at school, I was forced to sit in classes, to take notes and exams, to use textbooks that were flat, impersonal, deadly. What had been fun, delight, when I did it in my own way became an aversion, an ordeal when I had to do it to order. What had been a holy subject to me, full of poetry, was being rendered prosaic, profane."