By the Book

by Ramona Koval

  Did I miss-hear? Did he miss-see?…Was he joking? Was he mad? Was he blind? If this was one of his ‘strange mistakes’ it was the strangest mistake I had ever come across.

  We are Sacks’s colleagues or his students, his problems are our problems, and we are engrossed in helping the charming musical man who we discover can’t even recognise that his wife’s head is not his hat.

  In an earlier book, Awakenings, published in 1973, Sacks tells the story of his use of L-DOPA on previously catatonic survivors of the 1917-1928 epidemic of ‘sleepy sickness’ or encephalitis lethargica. He dedicates the book to both Luria and to the English-born poet W. H. Auden.

  Sacks met the New York-based Auden and another English poet, San Francisco-based Thom Gunn, when he was a young doctor working in the United States. He shared an interest in motorcycles with Gunn. When Awakenings was published, Gunn wrote to Sacks, revealing the dismay he had felt at the absence of empathy and affection in the young doctor when they had first met. Gunn was then in despair for Sacks as a human being. Was the change he detected when he read Awakenings due to drugs, analysis, falling in love or maturity? ‘All of the above,’ Sacks answered.

  Sacks told me that these older poets taught him to look at disease, disorder and suffering in broader human terms, not only in narrow clinical or physiological terms. To examine the predicaments and plights of his patients and to write about their dignity and ingenuity as they coped with their lot.

  And it is precisely this poetic approach that attracted me to Sacks’s work, an approach that describes the subject matter from a multidimensional point of view, without losing the benefits of other kinds of scientific analyses.

  ‘I think as a writer’, says Sacks, ‘one needs to bring out the passion and the purity of science, the excitement, the beauty, and the fact that science may provide the only way of observing and understanding immense phenomena that lie beyond the unaided senses—the causes of things, things which are below the surface, like atoms.’

  But it goes both ways. Sacks also influenced the way Auden thought about the world. Auden dedicated his poem ‘Talking to Myself’ to Oliver Sacks, in which a human soul pleads with its body for a quick death when the time comes. Perhaps he was horrified by the thought of living for forty years after the onset of a debilitating illness, just as Sacks’s ‘sleepy sickness’ patients had. And the poetic coda to the story of these patients was that most of them suffered terrible tics and other physical symptoms from the L-DOPA treatment, and sank back into their twilight world as if Sacks had never awakened them.

  I admire the way Sacks has tackled his enormous project of writing on human perception, illness and the way we live with our afflictions. I love books that attempt big projects, focusing not just on an individual life, but on large, unlikely subjects. Like everything you might need to know about whales, exemplified by a natural history book that is also beautifully written, Leviathan or, The Whale by English writer Philip Hoare. Not only is it a love song to the whale, it celebrates the definitive whale novel, Moby Dick, and its author Herman Melville.

  Philip Hoare had a fear of water, of what lay down below and he never really shook it. He only learned to swim when he was twenty-five. But from a very young age he was obsessed with whales, possibly coinciding with the ‘Save the Whales’ campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, and he began to dream of them as heroic masters of the sea, which, given their size and the element in which they lived, were almost unknowable.

  His obsession has taken on a romantic cast, sometimes bordering on erotic. He says that he sought to discover why he felt haunted by the whale, by the forlorn expression on the beluga’s face, by the orca’s impotent fin, by the insistent images of these creatures in his head. ‘Like Ishmael, I ran back to the sea, wary of what lay below, yet forever intrigued by it too.’

  My first experience with sea creatures was when my father bought two goldfish from a man selling them from a bucket at the end of St Kilda pier. I was only three or four, and I wanted them as pets. The man put the fish in a plastic bag and I held it tightly all the way home. Of course my father hadn’t thought ahead and we had no fishbowl, as my mother pointed out. The goldfish swam in the kitchen sink all afternoon, and I stood on a chair to watch them.

  In the morning, I ran to the sink, which was empty. My father said he’d flushed the fish down the toilet. He shouted at me for crying, saying I was selfish for thinking my fish could live in the sink, when there were so many dishes to wash. I imagined the lives of my goldfish as they swam through the sewers and, I hoped, into the bay. And I thought of them when I went wading in the shallows at St Kilda beach. The girl who lived in the flat upstairs had a book called The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby by the Reverend Charles Kingsley, in which Tom, a child chimney-sweep, falls into the water and drowns. I was fascinated by his resurrection as a water-baby. He could swim like a fish and breathe underwater.

  The first sperm whale wasn’t filmed underwater till the 1980s. We knew what the Earth looked like from outer space before we knew what a whale looked like underwater. There are species of beaked whale we know only from skeletons or beached remains. This is an immensely romantic idea, then, that a creature so embedded in our culture that it appears in the Bible can also be so mysterious.

  And Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick is, for Hoare, a bible in itself, so imbued is it with whaleness—the sociology of the whalers, the politics of whaling—on almost every page. In the first chapter Melville describes the men who come down to the coast and look silently, longingly out at the sea, spellbound by the whaling life:

  Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep.

  Philip Hoare told me he studies his tiny edition of Moby Dick as he rides the London Tube as intently as the veiled woman next to him reads her Koran. He regrets that Moby Dick is set as a text for American high school students, who, at fifteen, won’t be ready to take the book in. He thinks it has to be read chapter by chapter, without expectations that the narrative will tell one continuous story. There are a lot of digressions that he thinks can only make sense when one is ready for them. ‘Wait until the moment is right,’ he told me, ‘the book will come up, and it will surface like a whale and it will present itself to you and it will say, “Read me,” and at that point you will read that book and you won’t put it down, and you will want to re-re-re-read it.’

  Like the men in Moby Dick, most of us like to stare at the sea. Is it because that’s where we all came from? Hoare is poetic too when he points out that whales started out on land and then went back to the sea, and as they still have to emerge from the water to breathe on the surface, perhaps they stare out at the land, to get a glimpse of us.

  The romance and poetry of these ideas are undone with the realisation that if a whale were to reclaim its place on land it would be crushed by its own weight and die. In addition, whales are insulated by their blubber as they plunge to great depths where the temperature is very low. Blubber is highly efficient in retaining heat, but when a whale dies and it can no longer dissipate heat through its flukes and flippers, it can actually self-combust and will burn itself from the inside outwards. In arctic seas, whalers would slit open the animal and allow cold water in to prevent the creature burning in its own oil.

  Hoare says the Inuit have a word for the fluke print of a whale—qaala—which is the calm circle of water that a whale (commonly a humpback) leaves as it dives. The Inuit believe that calm circle is a mirror into the whale’s world and a mirror for the whale into our world. And isn’t that what reading is for us, a mirror not only for our world but a place that gives it meaning?

  What is the right moment to read a book? Is it when a book reflects the story of our own lives, so that we recognise the characters an
d what happens to them? Or is it before our own story takes the paths of characters? Do we read to show us how to avoid the events within? Has a book read at the right time saved any of us from certain doom?

  We can’t always choose the right moment to read a book. When Elizabeth Harrower’s 1966 novel The Watch Tower was republished in 2012, after being out of print for many years, I read it for the first time. Now regarded as a classic, it is the story of two sisters who are abandoned by their mother after the death of their father. The setting is Sydney in the 1940s. Laura, the eldest, is forced to leave school for a job in a box factory, and, in order to look after her younger sister, Clare, she agrees to marry the owner of the factory. Felix controls the women with a mixture of purse-string-holding and hysteria. Laura becomes both afraid of Felix and complicit in the menace he creates, as she tries to bring Clare into their orbit.

  I read The Watch Tower with a mixture of fascination and horror. It was impossible to put down. I saw several episodes in my own life mirrored in its pages. I wondered whether, had my mother read it and passed it on to me before she died, the course of my life might have changed. The answer is probably not. It’s the kind of book that you only recognise in hindsight, such is the strength of blind optimism in the young. Or at least that was what I was like. Optimistic and fatalistic, I thought you had meekly to accept what life throws your way. Now I know better.

  CHAPTER 10

  The aroma of faraway countries

  In 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was trying to dissuade a friend from buying a Tuscan Villa, said, ‘Let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause…They who made England, Italy or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were. Travelling is a fool’s paradise. The rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action.’

  But why not do both? Sitting at home reading the work of a trusted literary travelling companion can ready us for journeys to be undertaken, or can stand in for journeys never attempted.

  The great travel writers Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo depended on their readers staying home and letting books take the place of their travels. These days we buy Lonely Planet guidebooks and take ourselves off on our own adventures.

  The finest travel books take me to places I might never visit myself. Travel is romance, and far-flung places are always exciting.

  But who to trust and how to tell? The travel books that I’ve loved enough to keep at home are not those that necessarily give a tourist’s flavour of a place—the sights to see, the food to eat—but those that bring a knowledge of the history, geography and language of the region together with a wisdom and humility to try to understand the journey. In many ways it’s more important to like the narrator in travel books than it is to like the author of a novel. I’m happier to embark on the wings of imagination with a cad than to journey with a writer of non-fiction who comes across as ruthless or foolish or self-absorbed. Travel writers are my emissaries in the world, and I don’t want them to be more unpleasant, insensitive or ill-informed than I am.

  One of my favourite books is The Faber Book of Reportage. In it I first read of the 1709 rescue of Alexander Selkirk, a Scot, the son of a shoemaker, who had run away to sea and served under navigator, pirate and naturalist William Dampier. He’d had an argument with his betters about the seaworthiness of their vessel, the Cinque Ports, and tried to get others to mutiny. In 1704 he was punished for insubordination and left behind on an island off the coast of Chile where he lived by himself for more than four years. (The Cinque Ports later sank off the coast of Columbia.)

  Woodes Rogers, the captain of the ‘privateering’ ship the Duke, reports on Selkirk’s story. When Rogers picked him up he had some clothes and bedding, ‘a firelock, some powder, bullets, and tobacco, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, some practical pieces, and his mathematical instruments and books’. Selkirk declared that he read, sang and prayed all the time he was alone, and that he was a better Christian for this. He had forgotten how to speak English, or perhaps how to speak to others, and Rogers says they had trouble understanding him. Selkirk declined their offer of alcohol and took a while to be able to share their food. Daniel Defoe must have read Rogers’ account while researching his novel Robinson Crusoe.

  Mama told me once that, after the war was over, she had forgotten how to speak Yiddish. She had spent four years living in fear that if she were to utter a single word in her first language it would give her away as an imposter. She was most worried that she might talk in her sleep while dreaming in Yiddish, and would be overheard by others who shared her barracks.

  In another part of the Faber collection you can read the account of English artist B. R. Haydon, who sees the Elgin Marbles, the ancient Greek sculptures from the Acropolis, at Park Lane in London in 1808. His artist’s eye details something that I would not have noticed:

  The first thing I fixed my eyes on was the wrist of a figure in one of the female groups, in which were visible, though in a feminine form, the radius and ulna. I was astonished, for I had never seen them hinted at in any female wrist in the antique. I darted my eye to the elbow, and saw the outer condyle visible affecting the shape as in nature. I saw that the arm was in repose and the soft parts in relaxation. That combination of nature and idea which I had felt was so much wanting for high art was here displayed to midday conviction. My heart beat!

  And my heart beats too, to think of this private moment in 1808, felt and committed to paper, and then rediscovered and published in order for me to read more than two hundred year later, and to take pause, with the long dead.

  The eyewitness to history is one exciting aspect of reportage, but in today’s world, where everyone is a traveller and can blog to their heart’s delight, how do we sift through the myriad offerings in order to find the writers we trust to be our emissaries as they take us to new adventures?

  One of the best is Colin Thubron, whose last two books Shadow of the Silk Road and To a Mountain in Tibet were published in the years when it was my job to talk to writers, so I could judge for myself the kind of theoretical travel companion he might have been. Of course the thing about these writers is that they eschew all ideas of companions other than occasional ones they might meet on a journey. Travelling by yourself is really the only way to become dependent on the kindness or otherwise of locals who might take you into their homes and into their confidence. It is the only way for you to become like a stranger on a train, a safe person to confide in and never see again.

  Shadow of the Silk Road connected the dots between subjects that have concerned and fascinated Thubron all his life—China, the former Soviet Union and Islam.

  He started his journey in Xian, one of the first great capitals of China and the home of the terracotta warriors, sloped up into the far north-west, the Taklimakan Desert (which means in the local dialect ‘you go in but you never come out’), crossed into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, then dropped down into Afghanistan, He travelled across into Iran to Mashhad and to Turkey, and finally to the sea port of Antioch. Thubron reached the little harbour, which was silted up, completely deserted, with a few fallen columns around it. In ancient times this was where the Silk Road ended.

  ‘To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost,’ he writes. ‘It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples.’

  Fellow travel writer Pico Iyers once described Thubron as ‘very much a traveller of the old school: educated at Eton, a descendent of John Dryden, and distinctly British and upper class in his diffidence and command of culture and language. A few generations ago, he might have been administering Khartoum.’

  And he’s right. Meeting Thubron when I interviewed him at the Edinburgh International Book Festival he was polite and self-effacing with a wistful, private sensibility and a vast knowledge of history, literature, politics and geography, which he imparted gently.

 
He’s a man who travels lightly, with only a small rucksack. It was the same one he had on stage.

  ‘I lay out everything I think I’m going to need,’ he told me, ‘and then ask myself whether I really need it, and the answer is almost always no, you need hardly anything. There’s probably one change of clothes, fairly washable, there are language manuals, which means you’ve always got something to read, and notebooks. No camera; it renders you less suspicious if you have no camera. And that’s about it. A very small medical kit. It’s a lesson in how little you need.’

  He had a satellite phone in order occasionally to call his elderly mother.

  ‘I did once telephone and she answered suspiciously quickly, and I was in North Afghanistan pretending to be somewhere else, and she said, “How are you?” and I said, “Oh I’m fine. I’m in…” I’ve forgotten where I pretended I was, somewhere rather safe, and I said, “How are you?” and she said, “I’m fine,” and actually we were both lying. My mother, at the age of ninety-six, had gone ballooning, and the balloon had tipped over and bruised her sternum and she was lying in bed. And I was in Afghanistan pretending…so obviously this sort of lunacy runs in the family.’

  When his mother died Thubron journeyed, like many Hindus and Buddhists who were making their pilgrimages, to Mount Kailash, in Tibet, the place Buddhists regard as the centre of the universe, near the source of the four great Indian rivers.

  By then in his mid-sixties, Thubron employed Sherpas with a horse to carry his gear. In To a Mountain in Tibet he describes the desperately poor families he stayed with along the way, the food they eat and their hopes for the next generation. You trust his quiet approach, his knowledge and his openness in not coming to judgment too fast.