Book Notes: Chicken, Audible, Jesus, and Oliver Sacks

Have been plugging away through various books over the last month or so. Managed to finish a couple of them, and by that I do mean Two. Two whole books. The rate of my gettting through all the words is blinding, I know. Who can possibly keep up with me.

The first was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. I remember my dad reading this ages ago, but never was able to put my hand on a copy. Which does seem like a strange problem–why didn’t I just go to Amazon and push buy or something? But it doesn’t occur to me to go out and pay for the book straight off. I expect the books will come to me, landing in my hand when I wander through the library or shop, or handed to me by someone who knows I ought to read them. It takes me ages to remember to go online and just pay the money.

Just like it took me ages to buy chicken from the grocery store already cut into bits. I can’t tell you how many years I spent buying whole chickens and dismembering them myself, before someone asked me why I was doing that and why didn’t I just buy a packet of chicken already cut up, the packet sitting right there on the shelf in front of me? I had not observed it, even though it was placed on purpose right under my nose, lit specially so I would see and buy it. But we only see the things we are expecting to see. That’s the moral of that story.

One of the nice things about audible is that you get the credit and then you go looking for the book. The credit sits there, though nothing like a packet of bone in thigh pieces, inviting you to the pleasures of reading. This, of course, is perverse, because I do pay audible every month for the credit they “give me.” It is not a gift. It is something I pay them for. Nevertheless, it feels frugal and much less decadent than wandering around Abe or Amazon, looking for books to buy. I am not Kim Kardashian, to just go acquiring stuff I don’t actually need, let alone books. Perhaps she is not the person I am thinking of. I think all my problems would be solved if Binghamton had a proper used book store. It’s terrible that I have to drive to Ithaca or Cooperstown to be in a place where I can walk along, waiting for the book to fall into my hand, physically, all in one piece.

Anyway, more importantly is that I loved, Loved, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. It was a captivating, graciously written book, and I will probably read/listen to it again before very long. What I liked so much was how kind and interested in humanity Sacks was (I believe he died not too long ago). Indeed, as I was listening, I felt somehow that if Jesus were a neurologist and was trying to help people out of strange, science-defying predicaments, and he wasn’t God and couldn’t just heal with a word, he would at the very least talk to and about the human person like Oliver Sacks does. Or maybe it is that Oliver Sacks knew something about Jesus.

The deep rich kind curiosity of his prose is what I lack in the way I the way I discuss and think about human people. Everything that I read now is so brisk, so sure, so already knowing of everything. And I write this way myself far too often. I am very quick to know and to say what I know. Sacks treated people with ailements, with troubles that nobody can really understand, although we keep trying and trying to understand them. He helped each person along, trying one treatement and then another, but always considering the person in such a respectful and curious way that I was quite overcome. Indeed, at the very end, when he described two autistic twins, who, he said, shared a gladdening spiritual communion of numbers, I found myself crying, and couldn’t stop.