Oliver Sacks

Eu fico fascinada por pessoas com mais de um talento - "como assim é médico e um puta escritor?" Eu não queria terminar este livro. Eu fiquei dias nas últimas 100 páginas. Leiam. Que homem... Dr. Sacks, fique aqui com a gente, por favor. E os últimos parágrafos:

"They called me Inky as a boy, and I still seem to get as ink stained as I did seventy years ago.

I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and at last count had nearly a thousand. They come in all shapes from little pocket ones which I carry around with me to enormous tomes. I always keep a notebook by my bedside, for dreams as well as nighttime thoughts, and I try to have one by the swimming pool or the lakeside or the seashore, swimming is very productive of thoughts which I must write, especially if they present themselves, as they sometimes do, in the form of whole sentences or paragraphs.

When writing my Leg book, I drew heavily on the detailed journals I had kept as a patient in 1974. Oaxaca Journal too, relied heavily on my handwritten notebooks. But for the most part, I rarely look at the journals I have kept for the greater part of a lifetime. The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge; are shaped, in the act of writing.

My journals are not written for others nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are special, indispensable form of talking to myself.

The need to think on paper is not confined to notebooks. It spreads onto backs of envelopes, menus, whatever scraps of paper are at hand. And I often transcribe quotations I like, writing or typing them on pieces of brightly colored paper and pinning them to a bulleting board. When I lived in City Island, my office was full of quotations, bound together with binder rings that I would hang to curtain rods above my desk.

Correspondence is also a major part of life. On the whole I enjoy writing and receiving letters - it is an intercourse with other people, particular others - and I often find myself able to write letters when I cannot "write", whatever Writing (with a capital W) means. I keep all the letters I receive, as well as copies of my own.. Now, trying to reconstruct parts of my life - such as the very crucial, eventful time when I came to America in 1960 - I find these old letters a great treasure, a corrective to the deceits of memory and fantasy.

A vast amount of writing has gone into my clynical notes - and for many years. With a population of five hundred patients and Beth Abraham, three hundred residents at Little Sisters homes, and thousands of patients in and out of Bronx State Hospital, I wrote well over a thousand notes a year for many decades, and enjoyed this; my notes were lengthy and detailed, and they sometimes read, other said, like novels.

I am a storyteller, for better and for worse, I suspect that a feeling for stories for narrative is a universal human disposition going with our powers of language consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.

The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place - irrespective of my subject - where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.

Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh and as much fun, as when I started it, nearly seventy years ago".