[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumurad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today we wanna—I think we wanna talk about someone.

JAD: We want to—yeah, sort of a tribute. Is that the right word?

ROBERT: Yeah, maybe.

JAD: Yeah. We're gonna play a couple stories.

ROBERT: We can't seem to stop remembering him.

JAD: Yeah, exactly. So we're gonna play a few stories of him on Radiolab. And the first one, do you want to set up the first one?

ROBERT: Yeah, this was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

JAD: Had he died yet?

ROBERT: No, no, he was, I think ...

JAD: No, he was sick.

ROBERT: He was very sick. Yeah.

ROBERT KRULWICH: So we want to finish the night with a salute to a guy who's been on our program and part of our family pretty much from the beginning, I have known him for more than 35 years. Early on when Radiolab started, I asked him if he'd help us out and send us a few story ideas. He didn't send us a few, he sent us bushels—tales of chemistry and medicine, hallucinations, music, people, so many extraordinary people that he knew or found or helped. Because the guy just doesn't run out. Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist, author.

[applause]

ROBERT: He's a guy who notices everything. He's deeply interested in everything that happens around him and to him. And tonight we're bringing him back on tape for what, alas, may be his final offering for us. As many of you know, Dr. Sacks recently was diagnosed with liver cancer. And he wrote about this in the New York Times. He said he plans to spend the time that he has left writing, being with friends, not doing interviews. But he did agree to share his thoughts exclusively with us tonight, for you gathered here, because he's one of our family.

ROBERT: So as I've done for decades now, I went over to his house in Manhattan with my mic, and I said to him ...

ROBERT: I just need to know what—what just happened. A month and a half ago you were fine, and then what?

OLIVER SACKS: At the beginning of the year, I was fine. On the 3rd of January, I felt a little queer and I passed some dark urine. I thought I had a little gallbladder attack and didn't pay that much attention, but thought I'd better get things checked. And the x-ray, which was expected only to show a couple of gallstones, showed hundreds of cysts in my liver. Although my doctor said he didn't know what these were and I would need further tests, I knew what they were. I said, "It's happened."

ROBERT: And he was right. The doctors eventually confirmed that a cancer that had been found in his eye nine years ago had spread to his liver

ROBERT: Were you frightened or relieved or consoled? Or what?

OLIVER SACKS: No, I think my first feeling was one of overwhelming sadness. There are all sorts of things I won't see and I won't do. One or two people have written to me, you know, consoling me, and said, "Well, we all die." But fuck it. It's not like, "We all die." It's like, "You have four months." So far, the metastases from my eye are only in my liver. I'm told they love liver. Actually, I love liver as well.

[laughter]

OLIVER SACKS: And one of the magical things I did was to go and have liver and onions soon after the diagnosis.

ROBERT: Oh, wow!

OLIVER SACKS: And thinking, "That liver looks better than mine, probably."

[laughter]

ROBERT: [laughs] See? This is what he's like. Instead of being frightened by the thing that's trying to kill him, he's thinking about loving liver and liver lovers, and looking for connections and wondering. He doesn't stop. He just notices it. Case in point, a few months ago his doctor said to him, "We're gonna run a line up your liver, and in effect, we're gonna try to shave off or starve some of the cancer cells, first on one side, then on the other, to see if we can give you a little more time." But they warned him ...

OLIVER SACKS: As the metastases die ,they put out various unpleasant chemicals.

ROBERT: That may exhaust you, tax your system badly.

OLIVER SACKS: And at one point ...

ROBERT: Shortly after the procedures.

OLIVER SACKS: ... I started talking a little strangely. And as I was talking, I was also writing. You will be the first person to see this.

ROBERT: So he showed me a notebook—and we're showing it to you in just a moment. You can see there is writing there on the left. He's writing a book, actually, a children's book about the elementary table, but as he was writing, if you look to the next page, if you can see that, it gets a little bit wobbly, the letters.

OLIVER SACKS: And then there was some crossing out there.

ROBERT: Yeah, I see the crossing out.

OLIVER SACKS: And then rather dramatically the writing changes.

ROBERT: Actually, there's a large slash across it, and then it seems a little incoherent at the bottom.

OLIVER SACKS: Yes. Okay.

ROBERT: And then it turns to pure scribble.

OLIVER SACKS: That is delirium. It crept up on me. All this happened in the course of 10 minutes.

ROBERT: You see what he's doing here. He's figuring, "Okay, I'm writing at a constant speed. I know pretty much how fast I write, and so I can time this out. I can figure out exactly how long it took me to slip into delirium, and then out of this delirium." And he's doing this as a very, very sick man, "It's science all the time!"

OLIVER SACKS: If I had to write it out in a more medical way, I think this would form a lovely illustration. You put up a timeline of delirium, just coming like that.

ROBERT: Why aren't you more frightened? Like, unusual for any doctor and a man of science, you don't seem to worry at all when things become incoherent or strange. You're now showing it to me as it's like, "Ooh, how interesting? I was crazy here for a little bit."

ROBERT: The truth is, Oliver is fascinated by what goes on in the human mind, no matter how strange it gets up there. And one time when he was a young resident in California driving his bike—and by the way, I should show you what he looked like back then when he was driving his bike. This, I think, it's him in New York, a kinda—you know?

ROBERT: In the '60s, he was also a champion weightlifter. They called them Dr. Squat. And in this picture that I'm showing you here, that's him raising 600 pounds in order to win a trophy. Like, this is a—he was a champ. In any case, at this time in the 1960s, in addition to being all muscled out, Oliver was a serious recreational drug taker. And because he's Oliver, he was extremely curious about his highs, no matter how weird they were. One time, for example, he took 20 pills that he shouldn't have.

OLIVER SACKS: And then to my surprise, there was a spider on the wall that said, "Hello." It had a voice like Bertrand Russell.

ROBERT: A famous mathematician.

OLIVER SACKS: And it asked me a rather technical question as to whether Russell had exploded Frege's paradox. And we had this conversation.

ROBERT: You answered the spider?

OLIVER SACKS: Sure, I answered the spider.

ROBERT: You discussed Frege's paradox with the spider?

OLIVER SACKS: I did indeed. Because you trust your perceptions.

ROBERT: Okay.

OLIVER SACKS: Many years later, when I mentioned this to an entomologist friend at Cornell, the philosophical spider, he said, "Yes." He said, "I know the species."

[laughter]

ROBERT: So thinking Oliver's way, taking it all in, talking spiders, whatever, the generosity of his curiosity becomes profoundly moving and transformative when he's treating his patients. I want to tell one story here really quickly to demonstrate what I mean. Oliver once had a patient whom he called Mrs. OC. She was an old woman. She was 88 years old, living in a nursing home. And one night she was awakened, jarred awake by a loud sound.

[music]

ROBERT: It was a song. And she thought, "Well, somebody's left the radio on." But when she looked, the radio in the room was off, her roommate sound asleep, which was odd because the song was really loud. And after that, it was another song, and then another song.

ROBERT: And this is what she thought: "Well, maybe my roommate can't hear these songs because the songs are coming through the fillings in my teeth. I've heard that's possible." But no, her doctors told her, "This is something in your head. You need to see a neurologist." Which led her to Dr. Sacks. Now when he met Mrs. OC, she could barely hear him, the songs sung by the female voice were coming and coming. She was frightened and justifiably worried that she was going crazy. But Oliver said, "No, no, no. I'm gonna do some tests." And when he was done, he said he'd found a slight stroke or condition that had triggered 'musical epilepsy,' the sudden production of music in her brain. Now a normal doctor might say, "Okay, we've got the diagnosis," and he thought that the songs would probably fade and it would pass so they would be done. But Oliver did not stop. He doesn't stop.

ROBERT: He kept talking to her. She told him she was born in Ireland in the 1890s. Her father died before she was born, her mother when she was only five.

OLIVER SACKS: Orphaned, alone, she was sent to America to live with a rather forbidding maiden aunt. She had no conscious memory of the first five years of her life—no memory of her mother, of Ireland. She had always felt this as a keen and painful sadness, this lack of forgetting of the earliest, most precious years of her life.

ROBERT: So he asked her about the songs. "What are they like?" And Mrs. OC said, "Well, I think they're lullabies." "Can you sing them for me?" She did. And then after checking with—and I'm not sure who—Oliver figured out that these songs happened to be popular Irish ballads from the 1890s when Mrs. OC was a little baby. And that gave him an idea. Now what he does next isn't science. It isn't in any traditional way medicine. He just told her a story, and it goes like this. You know how nobody remembers anything that happens to you when you're one or two or three? Well, there was a theory once, not honored much today, but it said that those earliest memories get locked away deep in our brains in a special safe that we can never open. "So let's suppose, Mrs. OC, that your stroke by some crazy chance opened the lock that none of us can break and released those first memories in you, just for a little while. So that the voice you're listening to ...

[music]

ROBERT: ... that's your missing mother. And Mrs. OC thought about that and said, "Okay, it sort of fits."

OLIVER SACKS: "I'm an old woman with a stroke in an old people's home, but I feel I'm a child in Ireland again, I feel my mother's arms. I see her, I hear her voice singing.

[music]

ROBERT: Shortly thereafter, the songs began to fade, the pauses widened. Mrs. OC, who had been so frightened by this music in her head was now sorry to see the songs go. But it was Oliver who noticed how those songs had touched her, who noticed that the songs might become a comfort to her because that's what he does. He listens closely. He can hear another person's heart.

ROBERT: And this is really the profound puzzle for me of Oliver, because reading the new autobiography, you see that while he was so full of heart as a doctor in his own life and in the relationships that really mattered, it turns out he didn't get a whole lot of affection. He was for a long time, a lonely guy. I'd say he was very lonely. And he's talking about that now for the first time.

ROBERT: Let me talk about love for a minute. In this book, you tell the story of your very first love, a fellow by the name of Richard Selig. Can you just tell me what happened with him?

OLIVER SACKS: Yeah. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and a poet. And handsome and beautiful beyond belief. And I sort of fell for him, although I didn't say anything because I was very haunted by my mother's accusations.

ROBERT: What did your mother ...

OLIVER SACKS: Well, to go a couple of years back then, my father had opened a conversation that I was about to go to Oxford, a sort of father-son conversation. He said, "You don't seem to have many girlfriends." And I said, "No," wishing the conversation would stop. He said, "Something wrong with girls?" I said, "No, they're fine." "Perhaps you prefer boys." And I said, "Well, yes I do." I said, "I've never done anything, but I do." And ...

ROBERT: And you knew that then?

OLIVER SACKS: I knew that then. I had known it for six years, probably. Since I was 12. And I said, "Don't tell Ma. She won't be able to take it." But my father did tell my mother in the night, and the next morning she came down with, I somehow want to say a face of thunder and raged at me. And among other things said, "You're an abomination. I wish you had never been born." And then she suddenly shut up and said nothing for three days. And the matter was never mentioned again in her lifetime. And then two years later, I found myself for the first time in my life falling in love.

ROBERT: And this was the young guy, Richard. Oliver at the time was in college.

OLIVER SACKS: It was a very positive feeling, though I didn't know whether it was one which I dared express. But I did say so with my heart in my mouth to Richard.

ROBERT: What did you—do you remember what you said?

OLIVER SACKS: I said, "I'm in love with you." And Richard gripped me by the shoulders, and he said, "I know." He said, "But I'm not that way, but I love you in my own way." And I was glad I had said it. I'm glad that it had been received in such a warm, friendly way. I thought we might be friends for the rest of our lives, but then one day he came in to me. He said he'd been bothered by finding a lump in his groin.

ROBERT: And he was worried.

OLIVER SACKS: Could I have a look at it? And I looked at it and I felt it, and it was hard and tethered. It turned out to be a particularly malignant form of lymphoid tumor, what was called a lymphoma sarcoma. And he never spoke to me again after that. I don't know whether, since I'd been the first to recognize the ominous import, I don't know whether he saw me as a harbinger of death or a messenger of death, whatever.

ROBERT: But you were left with that silence?

OLIVER SACKS: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah.

ROBERT: A few years later, Oliver met a man named Mel. He was young, he was a sailor. Like Oliver, he was into weightlifting. They became close friends, and they began living together.

OLIVER SACKS: I adored him and was in love with him, and loved physical contact with him.

ROBERT: And they'd work out and they'd wrestle and ride motorcycles kind of tightly, and they never talked about what might or might not be happening between them. But one day they were together, and Oliver was giving Mel a back massage, which Mel often asked him to do.

OLIVER SACKS: And I loved doing that.

ROBERT: And Oliver says, sometimes he'd get a little, you know, excited.

OLIVER SACKS: And so long as I gave no explicit indication, it was okay. But one day, things went a bit too far and I got sort of—I went over the brink instead of just before the brink. Mel immediately sort of got up and had a shower and said, "I can't stay with you anymore." And I found that very cruel and upsetting and heartbreaking. And it made me feel I don't want to have anything to do with people. I mustn't fall in love. I cannot share lives with anyone again.

ROBERT: And he didn't share his life with anyone for a long, long time. In fact, he told me a story about something that happened to him maybe eight years ago.

OLIVER SACKS: I was just joining the faculty at Columbia, and I was having a sort of an interview. And at one point, the interviewer said to me, she said, "I have something rather private to ask you. Would you like Miss Edgar, your assistant, to leave?" And I said, "No, she's privy to all my affairs." And I then said, thinking she was going to ask me about sex, I said, "I haven't had any sex for 35 years."

ROBERT: [laughs]

OLIVER SACKS: In fact, she was going to ask me my social security number.

[laughter]

OLIVER SACKS: And she burst into laughter. She said, "Oh, you poor thing!" She said, "We must do something about it."

ROBERT: Well, the truth is Oliver didn't do anything about it because he didn't think he could. I mean, he'd chosen Richard, lost Richard, chosen Mel, lost Mel. There wasn't a point, he was thinking. And then finally—and who knows when or why these things happen to people, but a man came along who for the first time chose Oliver.

OLIVER SACKS: I had met Billy as I meet a number of people because I'd been sent a manuscript or a proof for a book. And an intimacy grew between us. I don't think I quite realized how deep it was, but then there was a particular episode in Christmas of '09 when he came up and in a sort of serious way he has, a serious careful way, he said, "I have conceived a deep love for you."

ROBERT: I have conceived a deep love for you?

OLIVER SACKS: Yes.

ROBERT: That's got a few extra words. "I have conceived ..."

OLIVER SACKS: Yes. Right. Okay

ROBERT: Was he scared to say, "I love you?"

OLIVER SACKS: No, he likes the English language.

[laughter]

OLIVER SACKS: I think it couldn't have been put more cautiously and yet more strongly. I think it was a beautiful way of putting it, and then I realized at that moment with his saying that I had conceived a deep love for him. And I—among other things, I thought, "Good God, it's happened again. And I'm in my 77th year."

ROBERT: That's amazing. 77.

OLIVER SACKS: "And what next?" And things basically have gone happily ever since. And surprisingly guiltlessly because then again, I'm not dealing with a 'what,' I'm dealing with a 'who.' I'm dealing with an individual. I'm not dealing with a condition defined by medicine or law.

ROBERT: I want to do one last thing before we close. And this comes from yet another conversation I had with him. And it's a story I know Oliver would hate because he's not a capital-R "Religious" kind of guy. But he is somebody who definitely embraces mystery. And for a long time, he's been mystified by a color called indigo.

OLIVER SACKS: Indigo, which Newton had inserted between blue and violet. And no two people seem to agree as to what indigo was like. And so I built up a sort of chemical launchpad.

ROBERT: Meaning he took a lot of drugs.

[laughter]

OLIVER SACKS: A base of amphetamine for general arousal, then some acid and a little cannabis. And when I was sufficiently stoned, I said, "I want to see indigo now." As if in reply and as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge trembling pear-shaped blob of what I instantly realized was pure indigo on the white wall in front of me. It had a wonderful luminosity. And in particular, although I am not a religious person, I thought, "This is the color of heaven." And I leaned towards it in a sort of ecstasy, and then suddenly it disappeared.

ROBERT: And he says he had one more moment like that—this time no drugs. He was in a museum, staring at an Egyptian artifact. He sees this brilliant color back again, just for a beat.

OLIVER SACKS: I was given five tantalizing seconds of radiant, ineffable beauty.

ROBERT: And then, again, it vanished.

OLIVER SACKS: And that was in 1965, and I've never seen indigo since.

ROBERT: But who knows, you know? Someday, I like to think Dr. Sacks may get to see that color again.

[applause]

ROBERT: We'll be right back.

[LISTENER: Hello, this is David from Berlin. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[music]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumurad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. So we're gonna continue our celebration now of Dr. Oliver Sacks. This time, though, with the help of a guy named Billy Hayes, who is a writer and a photographer.

BILL HAYES: And I was the partner of the late Oliver Sacks, and together we made tapes or recordings of conversations in the last year of his life.

JAD: And why? Why did you start these recordings?

BILL HAYES: Well, Oliver got his diagnosis of a terminal cancer in mid January 2015. The prognosis was six to 18 months, and it was shattering.

JAD: Shortly after, Bill says they were sitting at the kitchen table talking.

BILL HAYES: Like I—I knew that he had things on his mind that he wanted to write and I said, "Well what are you—thinking about writing?" This was about four days after he got his diagnosis. And he paused and then he looked at me and said something like, "A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day, but my luck has run out." And I said, "Stop right there" and I grabbed a pad and a pen and I said, "Start over." And I began writing as fast as I could, as he dictated virtually the entire essay.

JAD: Wow. Just sort of spilled out like that?

BILL HAYES: Yeah, and—so we had the idea of getting a little audio recorder, a digital recorder so that it could be on hand at any time. Whether to record what he wanted to write or reminisce or to collect stories. After his death, I put the recorder in a drawer and didn't pull it out again until over a year and a half after his death. I didn't even listen to it—any of it to write my own memoir. I had been, kind of, very nervous about listening to them because I thought it would be very sad and it would just make me depressed and sad. But, I took it—I took the recorder out of the drawer where it had sat for 18 months and I pushed play and of course, it didn't work because the batteries were dead. So I had to scramble to find batteries, and when I did and then pushed play ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Okay, this is a recorded conversation between OWS and Billy Hayes.]

BILL HAYES: I mean ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: On February 6.]

BILL HAYES: It was during dinner, we were eating at the time and he began telling me about his dreams.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Hmm, dreams, I've been having a lot of strangely archetypal of dreams of a journey I have to make.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Yeah?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Getting lost and getting found. Full of surprises. Maybe going through a door, which I would think would be a door into another room, but it is a door to a mountain landscape.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Uh-huh.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: And sometimes frightening ravines or having to edge along very narrow ledges, but then finally coming to some gracious, heavenly mountain meadow, and then waiting. Dreams about journeys and approaching end. And it's a journey from where to where.]

BILL HAYES: This was February 6, 2015, so about three weeks after Oliver got his diagnosis of a terminal cancer. And his immediate impulse was to write.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Again, this has been forced into my mind by the events in the past two weeks.]

BILL HAYES: Oliver was quite deaf, even louder than he realized, he would whisper words to himself as he wrote them down on the pad. And he wrote with a fountain pen. For Oliver, writing was a form of thinking and the primary activity for a human being.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: [mumbling to himself] Specific symptoms, perhaps it was of the general feeling—of disorder screws with them—and which may be tolerably severe—tolerably so severe. So severe. Patience. Patience. Patience. Patience. We long for death. We long for death. Now what happened to my other magnifying glass?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Eh, yeah, I haven't ...]

BILL HAYES: Oliver was the kind of guy who would take dictionaries to bed to read with a magnifying glass.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Can you bring my Chambers dictionary or look up a word for me?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Sure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: You may need a magnifying glass and I have one here. Ah-ha. I also feel the missing magnifying glass. There it is. Can you see if there's a word 'resipiscence?' R-E-S-I ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Yes. There is. Change to a better frame of mind; to be wise.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: To be wise. Can you pull out the big dictionary and see if you can find any examples? In particular, I want to know whether, "a return to health."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Okay.]

BILL HAYES: Here was a man with a huge vocabulary and love of writing, but still everyday he would be struck by a word that he wanted to look up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Well, it immediately says 'repentance for misconduct.']

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: What did you say?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: 'Repentance for misconduct. Recognition of errors committed, returned to a better mind or opinion.']

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: What's the origin of the word?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: To recover one's senses, come to one's self again.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yeah, come to one's senses. I think that's not quite the word I want. Debilitating—tiredness, disappeared—a little returned energy. Homeostasis is coming back. It's coming back. My fucking body. My fucking body, which I have so cursed. Okay, Billy.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Shall I read something to you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Yes.]

ANNIE MCEWEN: A general feeling of disorder. It is especially when things are going wrong internally, when homeostasis has not being maintained, when the autonomic balance starts listing heavily to one side or the other, that this core consciousness, the feeling of how one is, takes on an intrusive unpleasant quality. And now one will say, "I feel ill, something is amiss." At such times when ...

ANNIE: Indeed, everything comes and goes. And if one could take a scan or inner photograph of the body at such times, one would see vascular beds opening and closing, peristalsis accelerating or stopping, viscera squirming or tightening in spasms, secretions suddenly increasing or decreasing. As if the nervous system itself were in a state of indecision. Instability, fluctuation, and oscillation are of the essence in the unsettled state. This feeling of disorder, we lose the normal feeling of ...

ANNIE: The procedure, although relatively benign, would lead to the death of a huge mass of melanoma cells. These, in dying, would give off a variety of unpleasant and pain-producing substances. Soon after waking from the embolizations, I was to be assailed by feelings of excruciating tiredness and paroxysms of sleep so abrupt, they could poleax me in the middle of a sentence or a mouthful. Delirium would seize me within seconds. Even in the middle of handwriting, I felt extremely weak and inert.

ANNIE: On day 10, I turned a corner. I felt awful as usual in the morning, but a completely different person in the afternoon. This was delightful and wholly unexpected. I suddenly found myself full of physical and creative energy and euphoria almost akin to hypomania. Exuberant thoughts rushed through my mind. How much of this was a re-establishment of balance in the body? How much an autonomic rebound after a profound autonomic depression? How much other physiological factors and how much the sheer joy of writing, I do not know. But my transformed state and feeling were I suspect very close to what Nietzsche experienced after a period of illness and expressed so lyrically in The Gay Science, "Gratitude pours forth continually as if the unexpected had just happened. The gratitude of a convalescent for convalescence was unexpected. The rejoicing of strength that is returning of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future. Of impending adventures of seas that are open again."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Where's the microphone on this bloody thing? Where? Okay, you're recording this, right? The time is 9:20 in New York. It would be five hours difference with Greenwich Mean Time. And it is Monday the 9th. And that's to say the 20th day after my embolization, and just 48 hours till the next one. End of recording. Pause.]

BILL HAYES: On March 11, Oliver had the second embolization surgery, which would cut off blood supply to the tumors growing in his liver, with the idea that it would give Oliver more time, more energy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [pen scribbling, flipping pages]]

BILL HAYES: We'd been together six years. I knew him well, and yet I'd never seen him with such focus.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Believe at times, I question ...]

BILL HAYES: Just constantly writing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: I don't know what to call this piece. They can title it "Ninth Avenue in the Glorious Forest."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Well, I like "The Future I Shall Never Know."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Sorry. Oh, that's excellent. Yeah, that's it. And I think I need to put in, otherwise—just to indicate why it should ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Have some Ensure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: And I say to Billy, who is a good deal younger, who's younger and who is a good deal younger than I am—originally I put "who was two-thirds my age.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Because I have to be precise.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: I like that.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: It's really precise.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Okay. "Who's exactly two-thirds my age. Okay. So that's that. A little piece.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: For the New Yorker.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Okay. Have some Ensure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Thank you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Sure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: I like the idea of saying, "Billy, who is exactly two-thirds of my age." [laughs] It's not—it's not a fraction you expect to see. Three quarters? Yes. Half? Yes. But not two thirds. I like the idea of putting a tiny arithmetical conundrum.]

SIMON ADLER: "Ninth Avenue Reverie," published March 20, 2015. "Driving down Ninth Avenue, choking on diesel fumes from a truck just ahead of us. I say to my friend, Billy—he's exactly two thirds my age—'I wonder whether you will see the end of internal-combustion engines, the end of oil, a cleaner world.' The thought zooms me away from Ninth Avenue to a forest world, in particular to the one described in That Glorious Forest, Sir Ghillean Prance's book about his 39 visits to the Amazon in the past 50 years. He sees what we are doing to the Amazon and its many peoples. He speaks for conservation, sanity, reason before we destroy it all."

SIMON: "I went to that glorious forest in 1996—11 days of botany, study, and hiking, seeing hundreds of different species of trees in a single acre. I had planned, before I became ill, to go to Madagascar, to see its forests and its unique fauna and other wildlife, especially the lemurs. I love lemurs. One has to see them, study them, to grasp the origin of our primate nature. But most of the forests on Madagascar have already been obliterated, and not unnaturally, the lemurs are dying."

SIMON: "Honking horns bring me back to Ninth Avenue. I seem to have spent hours lost in reverie, thinking about the Amazonian and Madagascan forests, lemurs, the time machine. But we have scarcely moved, are still behind the stinking, lung-destroying truck. 'Not in my life,' Billy answers."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: I—yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been reading a lot of it out loud to Billy.]

BILL HAYES: This is recording where Oliver is talking on the phone to Lawrence Weschler or Ren Weschler.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: But anyhow, he—I was due to have a—a CAT scan follow-up on Thursday. I was terrified of this. In fact, what it did show was that 80 percent of the metastases in the liver had been destroyed by the embolization. With luck, I should have two or three good months after this. Well, I—I just hope that I can see friends and write and maybe travel a little. Yeah, and I think next month, if I'm up to it, I'm gonna go to London to say hello—and possibly farewell—to friends and family. And—I can't think ahead beyond that.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: [bells ringing.] Six, seven, it's still one short. I'll—so—semantics. Semantics—at ease. [pen scribbling] Use of elementary units—intimate relation.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Oh, I want to hear. I want to hear.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: "Over the years, I've filled upwards of a thousand notebooks. Their contents are various, but three of them have had a special function: to record abnormalities of perception during times of sensory impairments or deprivation. The column notebook is a very modest affair. It is quite small and slips easily into a pocket. Crucial because I need to have it with me at all times. In increasing deafness, I am more and more prone to mishear what people say, but mishearings deceive one entirely. You accept what you hear. You accept what you see. Every mishearing, it is a novel, surprising concoction. One never gets used to them. The hundredth is as fresh, as absurd, and as thoughtful as the first. 'Miss herring' became 'mishearing.' 'Take the car for a spin' became 'Take the car for a swim.' I've noted that. 'Your hummus' became 'Your highness.' 'Therapist,' 'invertebrate.' 'Tarot cards,' 'terra pods.' 'Big time publisher' is heard as a 'big time cuttlefish.' I said 'Did you say a poetry bag?' And you said, 'No, I said a grocery bag.']

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: [laughs] I love the idea of a poetry bag.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yes. I'm inclined, almost, to put them all in.] 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: I think they should all be in.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: I am a sheer mess. We'll make the point that sound trumps everything.]

BETHEL HABTE: "One's surroundings, one's wishes and expectations, conscious and unconscious, can certainly be co-determinants in mishearing. But the real mischief lies at lower levels, in those parts of the brain involved in phonological analysis and decoding, doing what they can with distorted or deficient signals from our ears. These parts of the brain manage to construct real words or phrases, even if they are absurd. And yet there's often a sort of style or wit, a dash in these instantaneous inventions. They reflect, to some extent, one's own interests and experiences. And I rather enjoy them. Only in the realm of mishearing—at least my mishearings—can a biography of cancer become a biography of Cantor, one of my favorite mathematicians. 'Tarot cards' can turn into 'terra pods.' A 'grocery bag' into a 'poetry bag.' 'All or noneness' into 'oral numbness.' And a mere mention of 'Christmas Eve,' a command to 'kiss my feet.'

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Oops. No wonder I couldn't write anymore. I must get more cartridges. I'm going through these too quickly.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: I think it's time to let your weary mind rest.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yes, okay. We'll see each other in the morning.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: If you could just kiss me whenever I had a dry mouth, I'd be in heaven.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: [laughs] Do you want some more water?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yes, I better raise my head a little.]

[music]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Um, um—would you like to pour out some wine for you and your elderly lover?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Sure. [laughs] You want some of this?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Okay. [laughs] You look very happy. Which one of these jackets appeals to you? If you're going to pick one, let's go to the start.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yeah. Well, of course, I have to take my own unfortunate shape.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: No, no, no. I know. I want you to respond to them. Which one?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Oh, I see. I'm not, I think, as fond of this sort of routine jacket, with its pockets and its flaps. Functional though it is. I don't know where I got that jacket.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: It's so hot, Oliver.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Sorry?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: It's so hot.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Hot?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Hot. Do you know that word? Sexy.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yes. Oh yes. Right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: You're very handsome.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: You haven't had anything to eat.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Uh uh.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: You should have something to eat.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: I might go out. I sort of enjoy that on Sunday night.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yes, I know.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: I get a little stoned and I go out into the neighborhood. Do you mind?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: No. I don't know that I'm good for much company anyhow at the moment. Yeah, go rejoice. [clock ringing] I wasn't counting, how many did you hear?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: I didn't count either.]

BILL HAYES: Oliver had enjoyed a couple of really good months of feeling well and fit and getting lots of writing done. He had completed not only A General Feeling of Disorder, a short piece, Mishearings. His autobiography On the Move was published, he worked on a piece on the evolution of the eye, and he'd completed a major case history on the performer, Spalding Gray. We'd made this wonderful trip to London for 10 days. After we returned from the trip, he knew that he would have to get another CAT scan to see how things were going. And I would say that we kind of had a feeling, an optimistic feeling. He seemed to be doing well. So he went into that hoping for the best, but it was exactly the opposite. The cancer had spread beyond the liver to other organs, that it was looking very bad, indeed. Oliver, more than anyone I think, knew that time was running out.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: [pen scribbling] Billy? I wonder if I could ask you to look up something on the little box?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Sure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: The 10 Commandments. Yeah, in particular, the one about keeping the sabbath day holy, I'm not sure what the exact—exact wording is.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: 'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.']

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: That's right. Let me just write that down. Exactly what I want.] 

BILL HAYES: He was having a lot of discomfort and had to have a catheter implanted in his abdomen to drain off fluid that was accumulating from the tumors, which was around August 4 or 5. It was really the only solution. And it also unfortunately ended his swimming. He was a great swimmer, and he loved to swim. But he didn't complain. Swimming had come to an end, so he put his head down basically and began working on this essay, Sabbath.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: At a time when you may ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [piano playing] [pen scribbling]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: What are you doing?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Filling my pen.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [piano playing]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: What did you think I was doing?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: [laugh] I knew what you were doing, I just wanted to talk to you.] 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Good morning.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kate: Good morning. Did I miss a dramatic reading?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: It just started a little while ago.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kate: How are you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Weak.]

BILL HAYES: His long time assistant editor, Kate.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kate: What are you writing about? The Sabbath?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yeah. It's going to be quite a long piece. It's going to fill an entire pad. "My mother—" why don't you get a chair? I don't want you looming.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kate: I just–I like standing. Is this better?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Okay, fine. Stand then.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kate: Should I loom over here?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Okay. Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kate: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: "My mother and her 17 brothers and sisters had an Orthodox bringing up. All photographs of their father show him wearing a yarmulke, and I was told that he woke up if it fell off during the night.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: [laugh] Isn't that funny?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kate: I love that.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: “My father, too, came from an Orthodox background. But they were very conscious of the Sixth Commandment, 'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.' And 'Shabbos,' as we called it in our Litvak way, was entirely different from the rest of the week. When Shabbos came in, my mother would light candles, cupping their flames with her hands, and murmuring a prayer. And I gradually became more distant or indifferent—" I think it's just 'more indifferent'– "to Jewish life, the synagogue, the Sabbath and the synagogue, in particular. Though there was no particular point of rupture or alienation until I was 18, which was then that my father, inquiring into my sexual feelings, compelled me to admit that I liked boys. "I haven't done anything," I said, "It's just a feeling. But don't tell Ma, she won't be able to take it." He did tell her, and the next morning she came down with a look of horror on her face and shrieked, 'You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.' The matter was never mentioned again, and a cordiality, even love was rebuilt. But her rueful, hateful words, her curse made me hate Judaism, all religions in their capacity for inhuman bigotry and cruelty. And it turned me, in part, to a self-hating, self-accuism, closet homosexual. I felt a little fearful visiting my Orthodox family with my lover, Billy."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: "My mother's words still echoed in my mind, but Billy, too, was warmly received, and there was no hint of the terrible bigotry of 60 years old. This was made clear by Robert John when he invited Billy and me to share a Friday evening with him and his family. The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything. And Billy, I think, was as conscious of this as I was. That I had been able, for the first time in my life, to make a full and frank declaration of my sexuality. That I was finally out of the closet, facing the world openly, with no more guilty secrets locked up inside me. And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, and my thoughts increasingly not on the supernatural, this has never made sense to me, 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 when one can feel that one's work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest."]

BILL HAYES: On August 14, 'Sabbath' was published in the New York Times. That same day, he began to dictate the table of contents for The River of Consciousness, the collection of essays which he knew would be published posthumously. He was getting his house in order.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: I don't know that I am capable of much writing, nor that I want to do any writing, but I hope I can, as I think out loud to you and to Kate and the recorder. Home hospice. I think that I will require an amount of care, including intravenous, nursing, things beyond what you and Kate can provide. Or should. And this in turn should release you to be with my friends and confidants. One last go at tempting my appetite, can you bring me a little bit of kedgeree?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: Just to mention, there is also chicken soup.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Oliver Sacks: Yes, I probably should have some liquid.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Hayes: I'll just do a little of each.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [pen scribbling]]

JAD: Two weeks later on August 30, 2015, Oliver Sacks died at home. In the last seven months of his life, he wrote and published nine pieces, and there were many, many more that he started but wasn't able to finish.

ROBERT: And some of the essays he wrote are now in a new collection, published after he died called The River of Consciousness. And that's just out.

JAD: The readers that you heard in the story were Radiolabbers Annie McEwen, Simon Adler, and Bethel Habte. Thanks also to Mike Paskash for engineering help. And this piece was produced by Karla Murthy.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Rhianne, and I'm from Donegal in Ireland. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Valentina Powers, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

 

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