18 Dear Friends (1985–2005)

But friends we stayed. Dear friends, and for the next thirty years.

Backtracking for a moment here, Joanna was indeed blindsided by that ricochet marriage proposal in the cabin by the lake up there at Blue Mountain (her father joyously catching the drift even before she did, jumping up to hug me much to her baffled consternation), and she and I were officially married, or at any rate celebrated a festive post-wedding party, later that year in Manhattan, with Oliver in happy attendance.

And Oliver would continue dropping by our West Ninety-Fifth Street apartment for dinners or weekend brunches on a regular basis.

Both of our writerly profiles and reputations now began to consolidate. I was appearing ever more regularly in The New Yorker, shuttling, as the people there took to saying, between political tragedies and cultural comedies. I was one of the three principal authors of the at the time still anonymous Notes and Comment pieces, alongside Jonathan Schell and presently Bill McKibben, this during the years of Reagan’s blustering senescence and Bush Senior’s belligerent sequel. In July 1984, I’d published the first of many pieces on David Hockney, in that instance on his Polaroid photo collages, pieces that came to be consciously counterpoised to an equivalent ongoing series on his polar opposite, Robert Irwin. In addition, in the months and years to follow, I’d cover the improbable discovery of a long-occluded first-generation abstract expressionist by a wildly fervent young promoter (self and otherwise) from Bangalore, India; an artist who drew money and spent his drawings, and the confounding legal quandaries such practices regularly led to; the nonagenarian failed wunderkind, the onetime avant-garde conductor and subsequent musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky; a rocket scientist turned investment banker who’d only ever really wanted to be a clown—to name just a few. (Funny thing about Slonimsky, who lived to be one hundred and one and a half, completely lucid till his hundred-and-first birthday, at which point a series of ministrokes over the ensuing couple of weeks robbed him of any sense of self, the only thing that survived unscathed being his vanity. He had no idea who he was, but he knew he was hot stuff and was quite happy to have you come visit and celebrate him as such. When I described the situation to Oliver, he said that just went to prove that the site of vanity in the brain had no necessary relationship to the site that warehouses what one might be vain about.) Parallel to those pieces, though, I was also covering the aftermath of torture in Brazil and Uruguay; calamities of exile among outcasts from Iraq, South Africa, and Czechoslovakia; and by decade’s end, the resurgence of Solidarity in Poland and the ensuing onslaught of neoliberal capitalism, there and elsewhere. Passion pieces all, as I took to thinking about them—evocations of the moment (as the theorists of Solidarity used to parse things) when people or places stopped acting like the objects of other people’s sentences and insisted on becoming the subjects of their own. When I eventually left the magazine, in 2001, to take up a position as the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, the New Yorker’s librarian took me aside to tell me that during the twenty years of my residence there, I had managed to publish more column inches than any other writer during that same period. I don’t know if that’s true, but I did publish a lot, and in retrospect, it’s funny, I can’t see where there would even have been time or room for a big Sacks profile.

**Oliver at our wedding, progressively shedding formalities**

My own efflorescence, though, was of course as nothing compared to Oliver’s, especially following the publication of his first breakout bestseller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Duckworth in England and Summit in the United States, in March 1986. (A question had arisen the previous year about the former, with Oliver’s agent urging him to find a more efficient English outlet, and Oliver momentarily hesitating. “It’s true that Colin doesn’t exactly publish,” he admitted one evening over dinner. “In fact, he privishes. His attitude is, ‘Why should I give advances? I’m not the Bank of England. Why should I advertise? That’s vulgar. My job is to see that the book is well edited, well printed, well noticed, well reviewed, and then made available for paperback.’” In the end, though, out of loyalty, Oliver had given the book to Colin, and deservedly so.) The legendary Peter Brook and his company would soon be fashioning a powerful theatrical evening based on the book, hauntingly titled The Man Who, while Christopher Rawlence and Michael Nyman turned the title story into a successful chamber opera. Oliver was regularly appearing on NPR and BBC and PBS, in both documentaries and newscasts, gradually (as he slowly surmounted his default tendencies toward tongue-tied self-consciousness) becoming everyone’s favorite public neurologist (both impressively erudite and impossibly cuddly).

**Sacks and Weschler backstage and onstage at a Lannan Foundation event in Santa Fe, New Mexico**

For that matter, we began appearing together fairly regularly in venues around the country as interlocutors of each other.

And he was at last starting to feel at home at home. Indeed, in September 1985, as the much-hyped Hurricane Gloria took direct aim at New York City and City Island in particular, he and some neighbors, though repeatedly advised to evacuate, had instead spent a jolly afternoon in his mariner neighbor Skip’s house, indulging in a hurricane party. At a certain point, the slashing winds suddenly stilled, the sea subsided, the sky came out dazzling blue—they were in the eye of the hurricane. “Everything went eerily calm,” as he subsequently told me (and I for my own part continued to record, though now somewhat more haphazardly, in my notebooks, not quite sure why), “the waves went suddenly flat, there was a glory of birds swirling about overhead, a bevy of tropical butterflies that had been hoovered up the coast by the storm fluttering all about, the whole was transfused with a certain sinister benignity”—and Oliver (of course, naturally, for how could he not?) went for a swim! Indeed, he misjudged his return to shore, and when he was still a good twenty yards off, the back wall of the storm came smashing through, and the last segment of his swim turned pretty hairy. “The rocks and small boulders under the water as I came swimming in were splashing all about like popcorn,” he recalled the next day, marveling and proudly showing off his bruises. In the end, though, Oliver had been underwhelmed by the storm’s much-vaunted ferocity. “It makes me wonder,” he concluded, “how America would react if it was ever faced with an actual reality.”

Later that fall, as the waters in the sound cooled precipitously, Oliver took to joining me at the local New Rochelle Y to take laps in its indoor pool. From my notebooks:

Massive solid physique swathed in grey fur. Black Speedo trunks, transparent black-rimmed face goggles, massive black flippers, fingerless webbed black leather gloves with implanted lead weights, and atop it all, covering the only hairless part of his body, a black swimming cap, like some daft rebbe’s yarmulke. He lumbers forward, awkwardly, anxiously, gingerly.

And yet, once in the water, his swimming is powerful, even, grace-flecked, godlike.

And relentless: He ordinarily does 72 laps but can, and does on occasion, enter a fugue state in which he ends up swimming for hours on end.

I titled this entry “The Rebbe from the Black Lagoon.”

While he was waiting for the royalties from his new book to start coming in, he was still limping along financially, so I got him a gig leading weekly seminars at nearby Sarah Lawrence (on everything from Leibniz to scotomas), and then, come the winter of 1986, a monthlong stint as a Regents’ Professor back in my old haunts at UC Santa Cruz.

From my notebook, re the latter:

Two Februarys ago, OWS celebrated the completion of his Leg book by breaking his other leg, sliding on the ice outside the City Island post office. Last winter, OWS spent the whole while mortified that he’d slip again and resolved to never spend another entire winter in NYC. I thereafter set about securing him a monthlong Regents’ Professorship at Cowell College at UCSC, all of which went swimmingly—only, as the appointed week approached, he seemed more and more anxious, so I decided to head out there myself for his first week, to try to make sure the graft didn’t reject the host, or vice versa.

Generally, things seemed to go well, but it took some doing. Before each of his presentations (T-Th seminars 3:15–5:15, Weds public lectures 8 pm), we’d set out on a ramble around the campus: he’d be virtually incoherent, his thoughts careening out of control all over the lot, me trailing behind trying to impose structure on the jumble. On Thursday [marine biologist] Todd Newberry and [Wittgenstein scholar] Bob Goff joined the walk so they’d know how to do it in the weeks thereafter. Again, my only contribution was the imposition of some sort of order in summation. Still, though each time I had grave doubts that Ollie would be able to focus and pull it off, each time he surprised us all by (grace of graces!) pulling it off flawlessly.

Later that year, when Joanna and I found ourselves happily pregnant (or however one characterizes that state when referring to an entire burgeoning family), we realized we’d likely have to move out of town (typically, all we were looking for at the time was one more room, a fact that priced us clean out of Manhattan). In no small part, we chose the suburb we did, Pelham, just beyond the Bronx city limits on the Long Island Sound side of Westchester County, so as to be close to Oliver’s City Island haunts, only a couple of miles away, and sure enough, his dinner and weekend brunch visits became all the more frequent.

Joanna was continuing her rise through what had become Human Rights Watch, eventually becoming Human Rights Watch’s first representative at the United Nations.

Our daughter, Sara Alice, was born on February 22, 1987,¹ and the next day Oliver agreed to be her godfather. She was not his only godchild (years later, late one woozy melancholy drunken evening, he would note in passing, almost unthinkingly, how he’d regularly fallen in love with brilliant straight young men, the godfather of whose children he later became), but he was her only godfather, and indeed more than that—really her only nearby grandfatherly figure. She’d grow to be very close to her Polish grandparents but only saw them sporadically, and both of my parents had passed on, such that as a result Oliver took on a larger-than-life role in her early years. Not to speak of the fact that he was literally larger than life. There are some marvelous photographs of him, in one of his more generously capacious phases, seated beside her comparatively infinitesimal self on a couch in our Pelham living room, genially reviewing a picture book.

In later years he would regularly amaze and enchant her, bringing over a new Tourettic friend, a young Canadian sculptor named Shane Fistell, for example, for walks in the nearby forest (Shane bolting forth and back from the path to finger-tap tree after tree, provoking little Sara’s sage whispered observation, “He’s just like a dog!”) or, some years later, spending hours around the living-room table at Oliver’s house, with another of his friends, the eponymous “Anthropologist on Mars,” Temple Grandin, the three of them deep in almost Talmudic disputations about the relative capacities of their favorite television character, Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Later still, when Oliver first met Patrick Stewart, the Shakespearean actor who played the commander Jean-Luc Picard, I don’t know which of the two, Sara or Oliver, was initially the more ga-ga excited.

As Sara began acquiring language during her first eighteen months, Oliver became more and more fascinated by the process, and perhaps as a tangent to that fascination, he grew intrigued by the languages of the deaf (or maybe it was the other way around, who knows). At any rate, in the spring of 1988, when the students at Gallaudet University, the country’s premier college for the deaf in Washington, DC, went on strike to protest the appointment of a non-signing president (and the implicit downplaying of the centrality of American Sign Language, increasingly at the core of a bourgeoning deaf pride movement), Bob Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, convinced Oliver (though I doubt it took much convincing) to go down there to cover developments. Which is how it came to pass, a few days later, that in a scene worthy of Chaplin’s Tramp in Modern Times, the famous visiting reporter Oliver Sacks presently found himself being pushed to the front of a demonstration march, holding a proud banner in his upraised fist. (It was in a profound sense Oliver’s own political awakening as well, his first actual gesture as any sort of activist, all his prior love of Hannah Arendt notwithstanding.) And the book version of the ensuing reportages that would follow within a year, Seeing Voices, would prove one of his most vivid and consequential (not just for its celebration of the sinuous particularities of sign but also for its deep meditations on what it means for anyone “to talk to oneself,” the role of language in such internal conversations, and the terrible deprivation of children born without access to language and denied a proper correlative).

His love of Star Trek notwithstanding, Oliver was still pretty much clueless when it came to the rest of popular culture. One afternoon, for example, he took to regaling me about a recent patient, a onetime hippie who’d become stuck in time, forever harking back to his love for a particular band. Oliver couldn’t remember the band’s name, it was something, he thought, like the Happy Corpses. The Grateful Dead? I suggested. Yes, exactly, the Grateful Dead! (In the years after the publication of the piece in question, “The Last Hippie,” Oliver would get to know the group’s lead drummer, Mickey Hart, and the two often traded notes on matters percusso-neurological.) Another afternoon, I received a panicky phone call from Oliver in his City Island home. In a great hurry, he explained that there was suddenly renewed interest from Hollywood in making a film out of Awakenings, and in fact things had advanced to the point where they were sending over actors to meet with him, and one was headed over right this minute, in fact, oh no, he could see the limo rounding the bend onto his little side street, only he had forgotten the name of the actor, he was going to be there any minute and it was all going to be a terribly embarrassing fiasco. Calm down, I tried to dulcify him, did he remember anything of what he’d been told about the actor in question? Well, he was being considered for the role of Leonard, the main patient character, and they’d told Oliver that he was famous for a film called Taxicab or something like that. Robert De Niro? I hazarded. “That’s it!” Oliver exulted, flush with relief, just as the doorbell rang in the background. “Thank you, thank you!”

That conversation apparently went well, as did another with Robin Williams, who was being courted to play Oliver, and as did a third with the putative director (although after the fact in that instance Oliver called me, in a whole new lather of fraught confusion, because he’d taken the woman in question on a walk in the Botanical Garden and he’d thought her name was Penny Something but all the kids in the park kept running up to her, gigglingly, and addressing her as “Laverne,” and what was that all about?).

The film actually came together and by 1989 was shooting in New York—in fact, at one point on City Island. The screenwriter had placed Oliver’s 1969 home lodgings in a bungalow not unlike the one he’d interviewed him at on City Island a few years earlier (even though back in 1969, Oliver had in fact been living in that spare little apartment right beside the hospital), so the film company had rented a similar house on the island for a series of on-site scenes. One evening Joanna and Sara and I went over to watch the proceedings, and while the cinematographer and his crew were adjusting lighting, we came upon Oliver, in a crisp white medical smock, standing next to Robin-as-Oliver in identical garb. Sara, in my arms, looked her godfather in his face, then Robin in his, then back and forth once more, before settling on Robin and pronouncing, solemnly, “You’re not Ollie.” Which cracked them both up.

Another time, Joanna and I went to join Oliver at an abandoned wing of the old Kingsboro Psychiatric Center in Brooklyn, which the crew was deploying as a stand-in for Beth Abraham. The place was often thronged with extras, in many cases actual long-term patients, but on that particular afternoon, they were shooting an intimate scene with Williams and De Niro alone. The blithe early days of L-DOPA are giving way to something far more unsettling, and Leonard, having been one of the first to assay the drug, is now one of the first to sense the raging onslaught of ever-wilder side effects. At first they’d hoped it was just a matter of proper titration, but this is the scene where Leonard realizes (in the screenplay, even before the Sacks character) that they are never going to find their way back to any proper balance, that this is just how things are going to be. Williams, in his medical smock, was seated by the table where the scene was going to play out, entertaining the crew with easy scattershot free-associative patter (he’d taken to describing the eccentric doctor he was playing to visiting press types as “a veritable cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Albert Schweitzer”), while the camera and soundmen were adjusting their levels, Penny Marshall was hovering over a video feed, and De Niro, off in a corner in deep focused concentration, seemed to be psyching himself up, rolling his shoulders and stomping his feet like a boxer preparing to enter the ring. At length Marshall announced, “Okay, let’s go,” and Williams instantaneously sobered up, with De Niro now lumbering over to take his seat on the opposite side of the table, already in full drool, and picking up a book.

“Action,” muttered Marshall, quietly, and the scene played out, De Niro, his jerks becoming more and more wild, his diction more tortured, his head flailing all over the place, unable to focus on the opened book before him and presently throwing it aside in exasperation, grunting, “I can’t read anymore, I can’t keep my eyes on one place,” and going on to wail, “I’ve let everybody down.” (Williams: “No.”) “I’ve let you down.” (“No, you have not!”) “I’m grotesque.” (“No, you are not, it’s not true, and I will not listen to you talk like that.”) “I am, I am, look at me, look at me,” whereupon De Niro breaks down sobbing, and a tongue-tied Williams reaches over the table to grab his hand. Two beats, three, and Marshall sighed. “Cut.” A completely stunning collaborative performance: Williams immediately relaxing back into his prior self, with a broad smile of accomplishment, but De Niro continuing to jerk and pound angrily, “Damn, fuck it all, damn it, DAMN IT”—everyone else trying to assure him that no, honestly, it had been a terrific take, couldn’t have been better, but him continuing to curse and stab until suddenly calm washed over his body as he seemed visibly at long last to rise out of his character, smiling, because, yeah, of course, he knew that.

Marshall looked over at Miroslav Ondricek, her veteran cinematographer (the master behind such earlier films as Loves of a Blonde and If … and Ragtime and Amadeus), and he nodded that yes, they’d gotten it. So she called a break while the crew prepared for the next scene.

An interesting thing about Ondricek’s presence: The crew’s outerwear swag that fall had been a black army jacket with the word AWAKENINGS stitched in elegant engraver’s green type across the back, and Ondricek at one point had taken a brief trip back to his hometown, Prague, just as the glorious dominoes of transformation started falling all across the eastern bloc, one country after the next, which is how it must have come to pass that just a few weeks later, when Ondricek’s old sixties dissident buddy, the playwright Václav Havel, stood atop that balcony at the Castle, addressing the celebrating throng in the square below at the climax of the Velvet Revolution, the country’s new leader was wrapped in a black lumber jacket with the splendid green logo AWAKENINGS improbably, uncannily scrawled across its back.

And speaking of costumes, at one point the filmmakers decided to slip Oliver into the film (Hitchcock-style), all gussied up as a department store Santa off to the side for a scene where the as yet untroubled, fully awakened Leonard made his merry way down Fifth Avenue among the shopping hordes. In the end the scene was scrapped from the film, but that explains how one evening a few weeks after Havel’s star turn in Prague, back in Pelham, just before Christmas Eve dinner, there was a knock at the door and Sara went rushing to open it, only to find Santa Claus himself standing there in full red-and-white regalia, though once he reached down to pull her up onto his chest, Ho Ho Ho, she gazed into his face (the bushy natural beard, the round spectacles) and broke out laughing, saying, “Wait, you are Ollie!”

Months passed in postproduction, almost a full year, but Oliver kept up his friendship with Williams (the two seemed to have an infinite capacity to crack each other up, Oliver even coming to wonder whether Williams’s lightning powers of manic antic free-association didn’t bear some happy neurological kinship with Tourette’s).

Finally came the release date, just before Christmas 1990, and Joanna and I joined the legions of guests at the premiere at the Paris Theater in Manhattan, followed by a gala dinner at the nearby Pierre Hotel. The film proved surprisingly fine for a studio production, the performances uniformly excellent across the board, the pacing and arc true to life, and the screenplay by Steven Zaillian quite faithful to the spirit of the book. The two main ways in which the film veered from the actual story were that, here, it was Oliver who, harboring messianic fantasies, first had to drag his hospital administrators along with his schemes (rather than the other way around), and that, Hollywood being Hollywood, the Oliver character had to have a love interest, or at any rate an almost-love interest, an adoring nurse (delicately turned by Julie Kavner) with whom the shy neurologist entertains a tentative, halting, and in the end entirely chaste and fugitive romance.

The audience at the screening was thoroughly engrossed and enchanted (offering a standing ovation at the end), and then we all ambled over to the Pierre. Oliver was walking alongside me, glowing, and confirming, by way of a side whisper, “Okay, I think I have this right, I kiss all the women and shake hands with all the men, even though I’d much rather be doing the opposite.” But he indeed had it right, and was behaving entirely appropriately, right through the lead-up to the dinner. Joanna and I were seated at Oliver’s table, on the other side of which was Penelope Ann Miller (in a ravishing sleeveless gown), who’d played De Niro’s brief love interest. Each place setting featured a corporate gift from the sponsor (Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein or some such), perfume for the women and eau de cologne for the men. Oliver, predictably starting to overheat, unscrewed his bottle and splashed some on his face. And then did so again a few minutes later, and again a few minutes after that. Presently he was actually pouring the stuff over his head, soon having emptied a good half of the bottle. Robin came ambling over to give Oliver a hug and was stopped cold, a good yard away, by the wall of perfumed stench. (Shades of cuttlefish and lavender!) “Whoa!” He seemed to bounce off it. But then, perfectly gauging the situation, he grabbed the bottle and proceeded to pour the other half all over himself in madcap solidarity.

At one point, Miller got up to mill about, and I asked Oliver how he had liked her performance in the film. Two beats, confusion: “She was in the film?”

And life went on. These were the years, during the late eighties, following the publication of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and the consequent increase in his royalties, that Oliver began to assemble the support system that would sustain him through the rest of his life (from helping him to recognize who had been in the growing number of films rendered from his books, through putting together new ones, to just running his life in general). To begin with there was Helen, his marvelous and beloved once-a-week housekeeper and cook (who stocked his freezer with a week’s worth of meals every Thursday, especially including a gefilte fish somehow as sublime as his mother’s). After she passed away in 1992, Joanna and I helped replace her with our own housekeeper, an efficient diminutive Guatemalan woman named Yolanda, who likewise grew into an almost equally beloved fixture in his household. Then there was Kevin Halligan, a lineman with the telephone company who one day paid a call on Oliver to suss out some trouble with his connection and stayed on to become his endlessly resourceful, endlessly bemused, all-around part-time handyman and bookshelf builder (and more, and more, bookshelves builder), presently taking on much the same roles in the nearby Weschler manor as well.

But most important without question was the arrival of Kate Edgar, a onetime managing editor in Jim Silberman’s office at Summit Books, who’d moved to San Francisco but continued to help Jim by typing up some of Oliver’s Leg drafts (becoming expert in deciphering the good doctor’s atrocious handwriting, sometimes extemporizing when such deciphering proved impossible). Upon her return to New York, Oliver and she arrived at an arrangement whereby she would rent a car once a week to drive out to City Island and tidy up his office, helping to marshal the pieces that would presently become The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a gig that gradually evolved into a full-time role as Oliver’s office and life manager, in which role she would literally render possible the creative burgeoning of his final decades. “His work wife” being how she once described herself in jest—his “editor” as she would characterize her role at other times, his “assistant,” his “mom.” Kate in turn would bring in others, including Bill Morgan, who took on the project of archiving Oliver’s prodigious medical notes, widely scattered manuscripts, graphomaniacal diaries and correspondence, and miscellaneous audio- and videocassettes; and the polymath Hailey Wojcik, who when she wasn’t transcribing new material or attending to Oliver’s ever-expanding correspondence had a side career going as a cutting-edge country rock performer. (Hailey’s lives would sometimes blend into each other fetchingly, as in her classic anthem “Amnesia,” the chorus of which runs, “Let’s get hit over the head / Just not so hard that we’re dead / But so hard we forget all the things that we said / and the things that we haven’t said yet.”)

On January 20, 1990, Oliver’s father died in London at age ninety-five. One of the encomiums noted, “Known as Pop to relatives, friends and even to the Family Practitioner Committee, Dr. Sacks still had all the notes from his two million consultations with patients across the 73 years of his practice, and was regularly making house calls and otherwise seeing the 2,000 patients on his list up until his recent retirement.” As I drove Oliver to the airport for his flight to London, where he would help arrange shiva and, more important, plan a new life situation for his brother Michael, Oliver described feeling “a vivid sense of the historical.”

A year later, on January 25, 1991, Oliver briefly made all the tabloids when he (“Doctor Played by Robin Williams in Film”) found himself being fired (“Awakenings Doctor Gets Pink Slip”), alongside close to twelve hundred others throughout New York, from the Bronx Psychiatric Center where he had been in active service since 1966. As he noted in an op-ed in The New York Times, “The medical care in state hospitals has been deteriorating steadily over the years, and now, one fears, it will be almost non-existent. Such a situation is both tragic and unnecessary. The savings in money to the state will be relatively slight; the cost in human terms will be incalculable.”

Notwithstanding which, Oliver continued to visit the facility on an occasional pro bono basis for years thereafter, regularly checking in on his own longtime wards.

Meanwhile, a few months later, Oliver was extremely moved at being honored with a presidential citation from the American Academy of Neurology before four thousand fellow practitioners at their annual convocation in Boston. Returning, he described “a sense of closure, of inclusion, of homecoming—and in particular of delight at all the young neurologists who came up to me, asking for their copies of my books to be autographed, declaring me their hero.” Indeed, he had become a sort of father figure, much as Luria had been to him. Furthermore, he was vivified by “the blaze of fresh excitement in the field, not unlike particle physics in the 1920s.”

During these same years, I published two pieces of my own, both political allegories drawing on my years with Oliver. The first, a Notes and Comment piece in The New Yorker on January 29, 1990, which is to say within a month of the climax of all the velvet revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe, deployed Oliver’s story of the remarkable revival of Uncle Toby—and his tragic fate thereafter when the ferocious malignancy that had been held in abeyance across the many years of his body’s metabolic shutdown came surging back to life with his revival, claiming his life within weeks—as a cautionary warning of things to come.^SB (A few years later, Warren Zimmerman, the American ambassador to the disintegrating Yugoslavian state, summoned the image of Uncle Toby in his accounts of the unfolding horrors.) Likewise, a few months later, in a piece entitled “Allegories of Eastern Europe” (The Threepenny Review, Fall 1990), I suggested that the definitive text on what to expect in the economies across the collapsing Soviet Empire as neoliberal capitalism was being introduced at turbo speed might not be some abstract financial treatise so much as Oliver’s Awakenings (talk about tribulations!) and casting Havel’s wearing of that black Awakenings jacket as he addressed the joyous throngs from the castle’s parapet in a decidedly more disconcerting light.^SB

Meanwhile, on March 16, 1992, in a move that somehow signaled the very end of whatever fantasies I may still have been harboring of being able to profile Oliver in the magazine, he appeared in The New Yorker (now Robert Gottlieb’s New Yorker) for the first time under his own byline with a marvelous short piece about his visit to a Tourettic surgeon in British Columbia. There would be dozens of others to follow.

Notwithstanding which, I continued to file the occasional anecdote in my ever so gradually expiring notebooks. Thus, for example, the film producer Neal Baer, who’d optioned the rights to “The Lost Mariner” for a project that never quite gelled, recalling how one day, when he and Oliver had been walking in the lee of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, he’d been mortified when Oliver suddenly collapsed to the ground, belly-first, veritably trembling. Neal thought he was having a stroke or a fit of some sort—but, no, he was just cooing. “He’d encountered a rare fern he’d never seen before,” Neal explained, “and he was fervid with ecstasy and fellow feeling.”

Another time Oliver reported how “in the olden days, whenever I got depressed, I sometimes used to become convinced that I was contracting Alzheimer’s. One time, to test whether I indeed was, I forced myself to write a précis, from memory, of Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and it turned out not all that bad—a bit dull, but then maybe so is the original. At any rate, it became clear that the depression in question was a matter not of facility but rather of vitality, which in itself provided a sort of relief.”

As may be gathered, Oliver’s growing public and worldly success was hardly a prophylactic to his ongoing elaborately neurotic swings. Peter Selgin, one of his swimming buddies, reported Oliver’s reaction, when they were out driving to Lake Jeff and had stopped for a coffee in a village along the way, and returning to the car, he noticed he’d gotten dog shit on his shoe. “And it was the apocalypse,” Peter laughed, recalling the scene, “a compounding calamity. He was going to have to burn his shoe, the gas pedal, the car, the street, the town—the entire world! The reaction was positively symphonic in its wild density. But then, later, he could and would laugh at himself.”

**Sara conversing with Oliver at our Pelham home**

Some similar reports were not always so risible. He could at times still become as awkwardly tongue-tied as ever. In another such sighting, in December 1992, my old LA friend Susie Einstein reported, “I just saw Oliver Sacks at LACMA speaking about mental patients’ artwork in conjunction with the ‘Outsider Art’ show there. At the end of his talk he asked for questions from the audience. An older woman stood up, with a lengthy tale of how she’d had a stroke a year ago and suffered some changes as a result. She went on and on. O.S. interrupted her at one point, trying to speed things up—still she went on. Finally, she made reference to a character in the ‘hat’ book and then said ever since her stroke the most outstanding change in herself is that she’s developed an intense crush on a man she’s never met, though she’s read all his books! The audience then swung its heads back to O.S., who was looking at his feet. After a very pregnant pause he mumbled, ‘I think the idea of questions was not a good one—that’s all. Thank you and good night!’ He’s quite a character.”

He was, of course, though sometimes not so haplessly benign. December 1994 found Oliver in another lather, this one far less excusable, as I noted in another of my now very occasional entries from one of my notebooks:

An incident last night was not untypical of another side of Oliver which perhaps I ought to document more forthrightly—initially not that important although perhaps significant in what it adumbrates and in any case the sort of thing that would be essential to ever making up a full portrait:

The phone rings and it is Oliver, sputtering with fury and righteous ire. It seems (at length) that he had gotten a new television in his office and had brought the office one back home and then indicated to a meltingly sweet neighbor of his that once he got this one hooked in, she and her children could have the one it was replacing. Apparently, she misunderstood (or knowing Ollie, she understood perfectly well and obeyed to the letter his own—subsequently revised—instructions).

At any rate, he came home this evening and his old TV (with its precarious antenna) was gone and in its place was the office one. Trouble is, the neighbor or her husband appear not to have known how to attach it properly, or to attach the VCR, and the resultant reception is poor, etc. (I can just see them halfway into the operation and not knowing how to finesse the completion, or not even realizing that they’d failed to.)

Anyway, Ollie is beside himself, over the top with histrionic, exaggerated rage. He can’t believe this violation, after everything he’s done for that woman, he feels as if he’s been raped, the whole house is sunken with moral turpitude, his heretofore exemplary relationship with the neighbor is probably permanently blackened by this egregious moral lapse, this monstrous theft and on and on and on.

Truly ugly and unpleasant stuff and really almost unforgivable in its vileness (I am talking about his response though I realize I am resorting to the very vocabulary of his reaction…) and perhaps that’s the wider point: Can one imagine what it must be like to have the capacity for such moralizing rage and to occasionally, often—almost always—have it become trained back on oneself? This is of course the voice—Oliver’s interior voice—of his mother’s deuteronomical cursing following his revelation of his homosexuality.

But Jesus, one occasionally does just want to grab Oliver by his lapels and to shout:

Grow up already! Get a life!

Later the following year, 1995, in a further effort to organize Oliver’s life, Kate and Oliver acquired a small office space in an apartment building on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village, just a few blocks from Stonewall, as it happens, but Oliver continued to reside on City Island and to drop by our place for regular visits. I note one in particular from May 1997, which I felt worthy of recording in my notebook:

Oliver and I take a walk in our nearby forest following his European tour for The Island of the Colorblind.

He relates how in Zurich he had to restrain himself before the thronged audience at his reading (he always tries to include some locally appropriate autobiographical detail at each of his stops) from noting that he’s always had a bit of a soft spot for Zurich since it was here that he experienced his first orgasm—at age twelve in the public pool … It was a few years after the war, he explained, and his parents were taking the kids on their first peacetime outing. He was agog at the splendors of war-spared Zurich, and one afternoon while floating on a cork raft in the middle of the public pool, he found himself feeling really good, and then better and better yet, incredibly good, and positively splendid, ecstatic with well-being. A bit later, in the changing room, he noticed his trunks were all sticky.

(Typically, he associates this with his love of swimming—I point out that all the surrounding half-naked boy-flesh might have had something to do with it, and though he doesn’t reject this out of hand, he claims he’d never thought of that.)

He’s publishing a swimming piece in one of the upcoming NYers and relates how he’s added a paragraph provoked by a recent St. Paul’s School alumni publication where it emerged that St. Paul’s had a vast and wonderful pool the entire time he was there, into which he never so much as dipped.

And why? Because, as the long-suppressed memories recently flooded in at his shrink Shengold’s, during his adolescence he’d been affected by a disfiguringly shameful skin pestilence, a free-floating, rotting and pus-ey rash that cleared instantly with his arrival at Oxford but that was so humiliatingly unspeakable that he never appeared in trunks or shorts or bare-chested his entire adolescence.

And what was it? They could never find a cause. Was it perhaps an expression of his shame at his homosexuality—or was his attitude toward his budding homosexuality in turn shaped by this sense of the shameful? Did it perhaps shield him from having to act on his homosexual impulse? Who knows.

From there, conversation drifts into his stop in Rome where he had a bit of an Audrey Hepburn moment—his interpreter, a young man, tells him he’d arrived on a motorcycle and offers to let Oliver ride it around. Oliver takes a few ecstatic laps of the parking garage and then trundles about into the city with the young man in tow (unclear which is Peck and which Hepburn)—the two have dinner in his room, he falling “a little bit in love,” as he seems to be doing a good deal of lately—but he typically doesn’t make a move, nor apparently does he invite one (I can imagine he’d be an awe-inspiring figure), and nothing happens. As usual.

Alas.

For the record, I also note a melting in his contempt for one of his former nemeses around this time: the inclusion in my files of a photocopy of a piece by Douglas Hofstadter from the July 24, 1998, issue of the journal Science on “Popular Culture and the Threat to Rational Inquiry,” with a note from Oliver hand-scrawled in red ink across the top: “I thought this essay marvelous!”

During these years, Oliver was becoming increasingly interested in his neurological artists, as he took to calling them: a series of cases displaying odd and often quite remarkable capacities for visual representation in a variety of patients. An accomplished artist who suddenly went completely color-blind and kept on painting, though now in grayscale. A young autistic savant, entirely infolded upon himself except for his vivid knack for depiction. An Italian immigrant in San Francisco beset by dazzlingly clear and sweet memories of his little village back home, which he was able to transcribe in oils. And so forth.

Oliver himself was beyond hopeless as an artist. Once, for example, he sketched out driving directions for me to his fabled Lake Jefferson Hotel on a little Post-it Note, which I subsequently retained in my files, treasuringly.

To get there, it appears one had to pass the Monticello horse racing track (or, as one might be excused for imagining, based on Oliver’s drawing, its rat racing track).

At any rate, on visits with such patients, he would often bring me along as a sort of aesthetic consultant—he didn’t trust his own chops in that regard. Some of our most fascinating conversations concerned another astonishing (though somewhat more famous) young England-based Caribbean autistic artistic prodigy, Stephen Wiltshire, who Oliver spent a good deal of time with, even traveling to Russia with him, during those years. Actually, in this instance I don’t recall meeting the shy phenom myself, but Oliver and I often discussed him, and Oliver would show me his drawings. Curiously, I note from my files that some of our most interesting exchanges involved not so much the boy’s drawing as a sudden recent flowering of the musical, in particular Wiltshire’s sudden passion for mimicking the Louis Armstrong version of the George David Weiss and Bob Thiele classic jazz standard “What a Wonderful World.” At one point I sent Oliver a memo, starting with the piece’s lyrics² and then expanding from there to note:

The first verse is all about visualization—it is the song of an artist, a seer, someone who experiences the world first and foremost through his eyes.
The third verse starts out being about race, people of all different sorts of races getting along. Is that significant given Stephen’s race?
The last half of that verse is the most poignant of all in Stephen’s context (“I see friends shaking hands, saying how-do-you-do, They’re really saying, I … love … you”). This is all about the sort of intersubjectivity of which, otherwise, Stephen seems precisely incapable. When you suggest that in singing his “autism disappears,” are you saying that while he is singing he seems to have access to possibilities of intersubjective experience (such as those suggested by the lyrics of the song) of which he is otherwise incapable? And does he? Or what?
The fourth stanza (“I hear babies cry…”) again is terrifically poignant in Stephen’s context, suggesting an openness to the kind of experiential growth of which, again, he seems so challenged in all other circumstances.
When Stephen sings “Oh what a beautiful world,” is he being or having reason to be consciously ironical? Would he be capable of that? You may recall that the same rendition of the song was used to quite lacerating effect in the film Robin did just before Awakenings: Good Morning, Vietnam.
More generally, do the words have any meaning whatsoever for him? Phrased differently, is singing this song with its words any different for him than humming it would be? If not, why doesn’t he just hum or play the piano? Why, in other words, does he enjoy singing? (For the external praise or the internal experience?) What is his experience of the lyric? Again, I ask all this because you say that while he is singing it, his autism disappears, and I am trying to figure out what you mean.

Oliver’s responses were in some sense incorporated in “Prodigies,” the long piece he eventually wrote about Wiltshire for The New Yorker and then included (as with “The Last Hippie”) in An Anthropologist on Mars.

Some of our closest collaborations during this period, though, centered around another of Oliver’s discoveries. In this instance, he called one morning, saying, “You know how I always drag you along for visits with my various neurological artists. Well, I realize that most of them are not necessarily great artists in the conventional meaning of that term: They are oddities, prodigies, and the like. But I think I’ve come upon one fellow who might really be a serious artist in every sense, and I need your opinion.”

And indeed, Ed Weinberger was something else altogether. A high-level investment banker and alpha outdoorsman, Weinberger one fine morning had found himself completely unable to get out of bed—he physically couldn’t do it—and was soon diagnosed as presenting with a sudden early-onset Parkinsonism that within months had him compressed into a rictus clench. Whereupon he’d launched a second career, with great focus and concentration, designing incredibly intricate modernist furniture, tremblingly applying pencil to paper, only deploying tolerances more aerospace than carpentry (thousandths of an inch rather than the traditional sixty-fourths), conceptions so formidably rigorous that hardly anyone could be found to realize them, until a master cabinetmaker in coastal New Hampshire named Scott Schmidt began trying his hand, to truly extraordinary effect. Oliver and I visited Ed pretty regularly for a long while, Oliver always getting set to write up his case and then for some reason demurring, till eventually (with a survey show of the duo’s work approaching), I asked him if he’d like me to write it up instead and he agreed, my account eventually appearing in The New Yorker under the title “The Furniture Philosopher” (and subsequently in my Vermeer in Bosnia collection).

On July 9, 1998, to celebrate Oliver’s sixty-fifth birthday, Kate rented and staffed a cruise boat for a trip around Manhattan, and it was remarkable how crowded (and how varied) the party of celebrating guests proved to be (Oliver was no shy, retiring recluse any longer). His goddaughter Sara, now age eleven, had painted him a memento of the occasion portraying the Periodic Cruise as it sliced through the Cuttle Sea (flanked by merrily bobbing cuttlefish), slipping by Mendelejev Island, with its skyscrapers consisting of stacked elemental cubes, the orange sun setting in the distance. Later in the proceedings, when friends and colleagues started going to the microphone to offer their fervent toasts, Sara, seated next to me, grew increasingly annoyed that no women were taking the cue. Finally, she just shoved her way up to the mic and delivered her own, with Oliver beaming off to the side.

When later that year Oliver later finally decamped from City Island, that framed watercolor followed, soon to grace the guest bathroom in his elegant new book-lined apartment in the building next door to his new office, at the corner of Horatio and Eighth Avenue (with a magnificent view of the latter, coursing uptown toward Columbus Circle).

But Oliver kept driving out to visit us in Pelham, soon almost every weekend because he’d embarked on a new project, an autobiographical account of his chemical boyhood, the years immediately following his dreadful stint in the wartime boarding school, when he was saved by the periodic table and his beloved Uncle Tungsten. Oliver seemed intent on converting his goddaughter to the One True Faith, and with the completion of each new chapter, he came over to read it to her—to all of us, but mainly to her: she beside him, listening solemnly rapt as he shuffled through the pages. And though in the end his ministrations never quite took (she was going to be a linguist), they were not without their effect. Later that semester, I got a call from Sara’s teacher asking me to come in. It appears that the kids in class had been given a pop quiz in the form of an essay assignment: Why are human beings on earth? Fifteen minutes. The teacher wanted to show me what Sara had turned in:

**Sara’s drawing for Oliver’s sixty-fifth birthday**

Why is the human on earth?

I believe that there is, despite the fact that we humans have done so much damage to the world, a reason for our existance on this planet. I think we are here because the universe, with all it’s wonder and balance and logic, needs to be marveled at, and we are the only species (to our knowledge) that has the ability to do so. We are the one species that does not simply except what is around us, but also asks why it is around us, and how it works. We are here because without us here to study it, the amazing complexity of the world would be wasted. And finally, we are here because the universe needs an entity to ask why it is here.

Not bad, I remember thinking at the time. It took Kant three volumes to get to the same place. But looking back on it today, I realize that who she was really channeling was her Kantian godfather.

Over the years, Sara had taken to traveling somewhere new almost every summer, accompanying both of her Polish grandparents to places they likely could never have gone before the fall of communism. In the summer of 2001, for a change she (now age fourteen) and her beloved grandfather Zenek traveled to the Canary Islands for a week by the beach, and on their last day they ventured out for one last swim, whereupon they got caught up in a riptide. As they were being dragged out to sea, both of them flailing fiercely, Zenek appears to have begun suffering a heart attack. Sara was at first at a loss as to what to do, he kept pushing her away, urging her to head back to shore. Eventually she did, mainly to seek help—she barely made it. Zenek alas did not. And she had to stand there alone as others rushed into the sea, presently to emerge with Zenek’s body. All of which her mother and I back in New York only heard about some minutes later in a phone call from the hotel. As things developed, the fastest way we could join Sara was for her to board the very plane she and Zenek were scheduled to take back to Warsaw, and for us to meet her there, where a few days later we got this letter (typewritten, by fax) from Oliver:

July 20, 2001

Dear, stricken Weschler family,

I don’t know whom I should write to, or what I can say.

What an awful thing to happen. I never knew your grandfather well, Sara, (it was difficult because of the language gap), but he seemed so strong and affectionate and playful and tender, all at once—and I knew, too, because we sometimes swam together, that he was a careful and powerful swimmer. I am sure there was no way to know (or avoid) that fatal tide—and you must see it as a freak accident which nobody—least of all yourself—could have done anything about.

I feel more than I can say, Joanna, for you too—because I know what a deep bond there was between the two of you. And I wonder, too, how your poor mother is managing.

And I feel intensely for you, too, Ren, not least because there have been other sudden deaths, deaths-by-accident, in your family …

If there is any way I can help, other than being a godfather and a friend and a neighbor, you must let me know.

My deepest sympathy, again, to you all,

Oliver

Later that summer of 2001, after twenty years at The New Yorker, I quit in order to take the helm at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, where Oliver was now a fellow too, and he frequently agreed to participate in our public offerings, including one early on that I recall with particular warmth, an evening entitled “To Be Young and On Fire: Pre-Adolescent Intellectual Passion,” pairing Oliver with fellow fellows Susan Sontag and Freeman Dyson.

Meanwhile, Oliver’s primary focus seemed to be turning from the neurology of the visual to that of the aural, and in this regard, I was of no value to him whatsoever. Indeed, I was so musically hapless that it became a running joke between us, especially since by all genetic counts I ought to have been some sort of musical marvel. My mother’s father had been that eminent Viennese transplant, Weimar Berlin modernist composer Ernst Toch, who following the rise of Hitler had fled, eventually alighting in Hollywood, where his modernist idiom was deemed perfect for chase scenes and horror effects, though he did go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for a late-career upwelling of symphonies. My father’s mother, Angela Weschler, had been the head of the Vienna Conservatory of Music’s piano department, and my father for his own part had been quite a proficient and inspired amateur jazz pianist. None of it mattered: The genes all seemed to cancel each other out in my case. My immediately younger brother and I both took piano lessons for years, and at a certain point my grandfather even composed a canon for the two of us, which, following months of practice, we were paraded before him to perform on his Blüthner piano. Following which, unbeknownst to me at the time, he apparently turned to my grandmother and said, “The younger one, maybe, there might be a chance; the older one is completely hopeless.” All I knew was that suddenly the pressure to practice and go on with my lessons seemed to fade away.

But it was strange, because as Oliver kept probing, it was clear that I had quite a good sense of rhythm, I could keep a beat, conduct symphonic records, and was not a bad dancer; I had a thoroughly adequate musical memory (I could recall tunes and hum them; indeed, ask me anytime and I will regale you with a hummed version of the two-part canon my grandfather wrote for my brother and me). The thing is—and I admit it’s weird—in any given melody I simply can’t make out whether the successive notes are going up or down. The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example: I can tell the first three notes are the same, but does the fourth one go up or down? Beats me, and I can’t even get myself to remember. Put me in front of a piano, and I will happily play you the first two notes of my grandfather’s canon (which are the same: middle C), but then I am at an utter loss and have to stab about haplessly, stumbling toward the next. This failing goes along with certain other odd idiosyncrasies, as Oliver was at pains to worry out. For example, no matter how often I try, I can’t recall whether the fork goes on the right or the left, I have to rely on mnemonic crutches, such as the fact that both “fork” and “left” have four letters, whereas “spoon,” “knife,” and “right” all have five—and I have to do so every single time. Similarly, although I have quite a good sense of direction, when giving directions I often flip right and left, this even though I have them correct in my mind’s eye; so when it comes to directions, don’t ever listen to me! I am a very slow reader (very much the opposite of Oliver).³

Though it’s even stranger than all of that, because when I talk about my own writing, or teach writing to others, all of my metaphors are musical: “This next paragraph needs to be syncopated slightly differently,” “You need a rest there, maybe even a pause,” “Maybe now you should shift from the major to a minor key for the next several pages,” and so forth. My grandfather used to speak of a piece of music’s “architectonic”—by which he meant architecture across time rather than space: “the sequential exposition of material across time in a formful manner” being another way he used to put it—and this is exactly how I think about narrative, as passages of compression and then spaciousness, vaults and alcoves and buttresses and the like. Indeed, when I am struggling through any sort of writerly blockage, I often spend hours deploying a big boxful of wooden blocks, many of them self-designed, across our dining-room table, not thinking about the subject matter of my blockage at all, just noodling around with form as such. (In the old days, when Sara and her kindergarten friends would come traipsing in after school, she’d have to yell, preemptively, “Don’t touch those blocks! Those are Daddy’s blocks!”)

And it’s even weirder than that, because often when I am writing and things are going really well, I will unconsciously find myself humming up a storm, even pacing my sentences to the cadences of the piece I am humming, and often, after I’m finished and the hummed orchestra continues to reverberate in my head, I will realize it’s one of my grandfather’s pieces!

And yet, because of that up-and-down-deaf business, I don’t especially like going to concerts, because I can’t make out the very things that must enthrall the people who do, the way notes and themes weave in and out of each other and the like. (Oliver, by contrast, loved going to concerts, in part because he could make these things out to a highly developed degree, though in truth, in larger part it was because they kept the lights on, however dimly, and he could scribble away in his notebook all the while.)

Anyway, all of this fascinated Oliver, he used to quiz me on it, and we were always intending to hook me up to an EEG machine so he could poke and prod and try to pinpoint the peculiarity—only we never got around to it. I (or rather my manifest oddness) did however eventually rate a full-page mention in “Things Fall Apart: Amusia and Dysharmonia,” a chapter of Musicophilia, the book he was developing all the while, which came out, to considerable acclaim, in 2008.

Meanwhile, Oliver began turning his attention to a similarly odd, though far more consequential, scotoma of his own, the fact that, as he began to acknowledge, he had suffered from a curious sort of face blindness his entire life, a facial agnosia, a neurological condition more technically known as prosopagnosia. He had a terrible time recognizing people by their faces, and specifically their faces (as opposed, say, to their voices or postures or gaits), even people he knew, even people he knew quite well (even Kate, even Joanna, even me), even himself (he was given to begging pardon when bumping up against the bearded figure coming toward him in a long mirror—and sometimes just the opposite: I was once returning from the bathroom at a diner and saw him primping his beard while gazing intently upon the actual bearded fellow the next banquette over, who was staring back at him in some bewilderment).

Sometimes the effects could be quite amusing. “I often tend to recognize similarities in style over substance,” he once confided when our conversation turned to his problem. “The other day, for instance, I walked up to a couple of men and asked if they were brothers. ‘Brothers?’ one of them shot back. ‘Brothers? Are you out of your mind? Can’t you see that we’re father and son? My hair is white and his is jet-black!’” But other times they could be almost paralyzingly debilitating. He dreaded parties and other sorts of social occasions, even to an extent his own birthday parties. He knew he would fail to recognize cherished friends and, almost as bad, in an attempt to compensate, strike up intimate conversations with complete strangers. He’d be causing offense on all sides. And I gradually came to realize that what so often passed with Oliver for strangulated shyness, stammering awkwardness, or even insufferable arrogance simply rose from the fact that he had no idea whatsoever whom he was talking to. It was a syndrome that had cast a long shadow across his life.

Nor was he by any means alone in this, as became dazzlingly clear a few years later when he published a piece on the subject in The New Yorker. Much as had happened earlier when his pieces on Tourette’s or the autism spectrum had opened readers’ eyes to the presence of such folk all around them (and brought a corresponding measure of surcease to those struggling in self-imagined isolation with the conditions, and to their families), hundreds of people began writing in with their own stories and their appreciation at being recognized, their surpassing relief at having their secret torment named and explained and acknowledged. Most famously, perhaps, it turned out that the great artist Chuck Close had long suffered from the same perplex (that’s in part what his giant gridded facial portraits had been all about, an attempt to overmaster the difficulty), and Oliver and Chuck began appearing together onstage and on the radio (specifically on Robert Krulwich’s public radio show, Radiolab) to discuss their mutual travails, in conversations that were both deeply heartening and uproariously funny.

Of course, Oliver’s prosopagnosic tendencies also tracked uncannily with some of the deficits he kept locating, probing, and memorializing in the lives of several of his patient-subjects—not least, in this instance, the man who mistook his wife for a hat, another instance where Oliver’s preternatural capacity for empathy seemed rooted in a sense of fellow feeling, of recognition all the more remarkable in that it was all about a fellow inability, precisely, to recognize anyone at all!