Oliver Sacks: What and You

Oliver Sacks once told an unknown correspondent of a letter

to treat no problem as a “what” that interferes with being “you,”

for any personality disorder a great meta-

physic that is therapeutically effective for folk who

feel plagued by what which, by infecting their identity,

can trouble it and make it to their “you” untrue, this “you” like “Thou,”

the label Martin Buber gave the Divine Entity

who almost is impossible to reach, rarely willing to allow

relationships with Him, not due to problems caused by what,

but to the fact that we our selves most rarely understand,

and due to this ignoble ignorance cannot

from a Thou whom we respect untheological relationships demand.

In  “ The Oliver Sacks I Knew and Loved Once Saw Himself as a Failure,” NYT, 10/19/24. Bill Hayes, Oliver Sacks’s partner in the last six years of his life, writes:

The Oliver Sacks that most of the world knew — the one I fell in love with after we met in 2008, when he was 75 — was the beloved neurologist and the author of many best-selling books, admired worldwide. A forthcoming volume of Oliver’s letters, nearly 350 of them, spanning 55 years, from age 27 to 82, provides a more complicated picture of the man often referred to in his later years as “the poet laureate of medicine.”….

That one’s humanity is embedded in one’s genetic uniqueness is beautifully articulated in a 2006 reply to a young woman with bipolar disorder, who had asked him, “Am I just a mistake that somehow survived evolution’s ax?”

Though she was a stranger to him — one of his thousands of correspondents — Oliver replied by letter immediately: “What seems to me less stressed, and most in need of stressing,” he wrote to her, “is that you are an individual — unique — with gifts and genes which no one else in the world exactly duplicates — and that means you have a true place and role in evolution — and in the present. That you have bipolar disorder … does not begin to encompass the whole of you — it is a what, while you are a you. You have to hold to this sense of personhood … which is deeper than any ‘condition’ you have.”