Vintage Sacks by Oliver Sacks Read Free Book Online Page A

may never have seen a Rose R., but once we have read of her we see the world differently—we can imagine her world, with a sort of awe, and with this our world is suddenly enlarged. A wonderful example of such a creative response was given by Harold Pinter in his play,
A Kind of
Alaska;
this is Pinter’s world, the landscape of his unique gifts and sensibility, but it is also Rose R.’s world, and the world of
Awakenings.
Pinter’s play has been followed by several adaptations of
Awakenings
for stage and screen; each of these has drawn on different aspects of the book. Every reader will bring to
Awakenings
his own imagination and sensibilities, and will find, if he lets himself, his world strangely deepened, imbued with a new depth of tenderness and perhaps horror. For these patients, while seemingly so extraordinary, so “special,” have in them something of the universal, and can call to everyone, awaken everyone, as they called to and awakened me.
    I hesitated very greatly in regard to the original publication of our patients’ “story” and their lives. But they themselves encouraged me, and said to me from the first, “Tell our story—or it will never be known.”
    A few of the patients are still alive—we have known each other for twenty-four years now. But those who have died are in some sense not dead—their unclosed charts, their letters, still face me as I write. They still live, for me, in some very personal way. They were not only patients but teachers and friends, and the years I spent with them were the most significant of my life. I want something of their lives, their presence, to be preserved and live for others, as exemplars of human predicament and survival. This is the testimony, the only testimony, of a unique event—but one which may become an allegory for us all.

ROSE R.
    Miss R. was born in New York City in 1905, the youngest child of a large, wealthy, and talented family. Her childhood and school days were free of serious illness, and were marked, from their earliest days, by love of merriment, games, and jokes. High-spirited, talented, full of interests and hobbies, sustained by deep family affection and love, and a sure sense of who and what and why she was, Miss R. steered clear of significant neurotic problems or “identity-crises” in her growing-up period.
    On leaving school, Miss R. threw herself ardently into a social and peripatetic life. Airplanes, above all, appealed to her eager, volant, and irrepressible spirit; she flew to Pittsburgh and Denver, New Orleans and Chicago, and twice to the California of Hearst and Hollywood (no mean feat in the planes of those days). She went to innumerable parties and shows, was toasted and fêted, and rolled home drunk at night. And between parties and flights she dashed off sketches of the bridges and water-fronts with which New York abounded. Between 1922 and 1926, Miss R. lived in the blaze of her own vitality, and lived more than most other people in the whole of their lives. And this was as well, for at the age of twenty-one she was suddenly struck down by a virulent form of
encephalitis lethargica
—one of its last victims before the epidemic vanished. Nineteen twenty-six, then, was the last year in which Miss R. really
lived.
    The night of the sleeping sickness, and the days which followed it, can be reconstructed in great detail from Miss R.’s relatives, and Miss R. herself. The acute phase announced itself (as sometimes happened: compare Maria G.) by nightmares of a grotesque and terrifying and premonitory nature. Miss R. had a series of dreams about one central theme: she dreamed she was imprisoned in an inaccessible castle, but the castle had the form and shape of herself; she dreamed of enchantments, bewitchments, entrancements; she dreamed that she had become a living, sentient statue of stone; she dreamed that the world had come to a stop; she dreamed that she had