Oliver Sacks is dead

"Dr. Sacks announced in February, in an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times, that an earlier melanoma in his eye had spread to his liver and that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer."

“I am very tenacious, for better or worse,” he wrote in “A Leg to Stand On.” “If my attention is engaged, I cannot disengage it. This may be a great strength, or weakness. It makes me an investigator. It makes me an obsessional.”

“I love to discover potential in people who aren’t thought to have any,” hetold People magazine in 1986.

He was also a man of contradictions: candid and guarded, gregarious and solitary, clinical and compassionate, scientific and poetic, British and almost American. “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,” he told The Guardian in 2005.

For years, Dr. Sacks lived on City Island in the Bronx, where he liked to take long swims around it. More recently, he lived in Greenwich Village. But he remained ambivalent about being called a New Yorker.

“I rather like the words ‘resident alien,’ ” he told The Guardian. “It’s how I feel. I’m a sympathetic, resident, sort of visiting alien.”

Sacks’s last piece in the Times, which appeared just two weeks ago, ended like this:

“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.”

Watch Oliver Sacks on writing, after the break...

Link to video