Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author whose books and case histories in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books introduced a lay audience to the furthest corners of human consciousness, died Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 82.
Kate Edgar, his personal assistant, confirmed to the New York Times that the cause was cancer.
Sacks received his medical degree from the Queen’s College, Oxford. He moved to America in the early 1960s for an internship at San Francisco’s Mount Zion Hospital, after which he was a resident at UCLA.
“In 1961, I declared my intention to become a United States citizen, which may have been a genuine intention, but I never got round to it. I think it may go with a slight feeling that this was only an extended visit,” he told the Guardian in 2005. “I rather like the words ‘resident alien’. It’s how I feel. I’m a sympathetic, resident, sort of visiting alien.”
He moved to New York in 1965 for a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. For many years, Sacks lived in the Bronx, on City Island, around which he would take long swims. Recently, he moved to Greenwich Village.
In a series of essays for the Times beginning in February, Sacks meditated on his diagnosis:
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
The most recent installment was published just a few weeks ago:
And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.
Photo credit: Getty Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.