Commonplace book - quotations

On teaching - 

“I think that I am a good (and, very rarely, at magic moments, a great) teacher: not because I communicate facts, but because I somehow convey a sort of passion for the patient and the subject, and a feeling of the texture of patients, the way their symptoms dovetail into their total being, and how this, in turn, dovetails into their total environment: in short, a sort of wonder and delight at the way everything fits (and it does all fit, so beautifully, like a wonderful jigsaw puzzle).”  

- O. Sacks Letters, p. 179. 

Oliver Sacks, letters - p.182-3.  

narrative vs. reductionism in analysis of patients and symptoms.  

"Seeing Calne, sitting through his clinic, and reading his book, were also highly significant experiences for me, for they brought into the sharpest focus the antithesis of two styles. He sat in his clinic, alert, neat, quick, with a pile of ruled test-sheets in front of him, rapidly reducing his patients to test-scores, and paying (unless I do him an injustice) almost no attention to them as people: tremor 3, rigidity 2½, akinesia 4, next patient please, etc. I was irresistibly reminded of Henry James impression of Ellis Island, of the immigrants "appealing and waiting, marshalled, herded, divided, subdivided, sorted, sifted... an intendedly 'scientific' feeding of the mill" and of the folly of this sort of ‘objective’ examination which replaced human judgement by stereotyped questionnaires. […]. 

In some very fundamental sense, when all the gradings and rating and testings and measurements have been done, and all test sheets and schedules filled up, the very flesh of the subject has escaped, like a jellyfish through a tea strainer. It is so senseless to describe symptoms and signs as if they were fixed emanations from the patient, when they are no more than reactions at a particular moment to a particular stimulus ("Symptoms are answers." writes Goldstein, “given by the modified organism, to definite demands... (their appearance) depends on the method of examination").

I am forgetting that this is a letter, and getting all hot-under-the-collar and polemical. Actually, I think I am rehearsing the preface to my book on Parkinsonism, which I have just started writing, and which perhaps Calne's book has, in part, stimulated. I am sure that a wholly different mode of description can be used, must be used, in place of these horrid test-figures with their derivative graphs and statistics. The classical mode of description is narrative. I see no way of picturing the innumerable influences and factors involved except in a narrative. Can you imagine Dombey or Jarndyce reduced to a few figures and diagrams? I think there is something almost inhuman about the mechanical intelligence which has taken over so much scientific and medical writing: it is reasonable enough to describe physical and chemical and simple physiological processes, but cannot possibly indicate the repertoire of higher behaviour. I was reading Hard Times a couple of weeks ago, and find myself thinking of Calnes approach (which is the accredited and almost universal approach to patients, and mode of presenting data) as pure Gradgrind. You were good enough to use the word Oslerian of one of my Lancet letters: I assure you that I was not indulging in deliberate archaism, but using the only mode of presenting the data which could begin to do justice to it."

Sudnow on Tolstoy on conversation  — From David Sudnow, Passing On, 1967.  Pgs 149-150. 

“The function of "talk" in situations of trauma was perhaps nowhere so elegantly depicted as by Tolstoy in his descriptions of the Ancien Regime. 

In 1805 and during the Italian campaigns of the Bonaparte revolution, Napoleon is planning his invasion of Russia.  In the opening scene of War and Peace, Ana Pavlovna is having one of her famous "soirées" and Tolstoy has her greet a guest, in the opening paragraph of the book, with the following remarks:

‘Well prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you, that if you do not tell me we are at war, if you again allow yourself to palliate all the infamies and atrocities of this Antichrist - upon my word I believe he is -  I don't know you in future, you are no longer my friend, no longer my faithful slave, as you say. There, how do you do, how do you do, I see I’m scaring you, sit down and talk to me.’  [22]

22 —  L. Tolstoy, War and Peace (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 1.

“Tolstoy's insight, seen in the line "sit down and talk to me", was that in constructing "talk," matters which otherwise might produce severe immobility, upsettedness, consternation, and fear, could be overlaid by ordinary conventions of interaction and thereby have their sense incorporated within and constrained by the requirements of ordinary social discourse. Throughout the first chapter of the book, Tolstoy has Ana Pavlovna engaged in the production of "talk." War and Peace can be said to have as one of its central themes the notion that in doing "talk," persons, as members of a society, provide for the stability of the social world.  [23] 

23 — Perhaps his most elegant statement is on p. 704, op. cit.:

“As the enemy drew nearer to Moscow the attitude taken by its inhabitants in regard to their position did not become more serious but, on the contrary, more frivolous, as is always the case with people who see a great danger approaching. At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonably says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not in a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till ti has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second. So it was now with the inhabitants of Moscow. It was long since there had been so much gaiety in Moscow as that year.” 

"The primary goal of the social sciences is to obtain organized knowledge of social reality. By the term "social reality" I wish to be understood the sum total of objects and occurrences within the social cultural world as experienced by the common-sense thinking of men living their daily lives among their fellow men, connected with them in manifold relations of interaction. It is the world of cultural objects and social institutions into which we are all born, within which we have to find our bearings, and with which we have to come to terms. From the outset, we, the actors on the social scene, experience the world we live in as a world both of nature and of culture, not as a private but as an intersubjective one, that is, as a world common to all of us, either actually given or potentially accessible to everyone; and this involves intercommunication and language.

All forms of naturalism and logical empiricism simply take for granted this social reality, which is the proper object of the social sciences.

Intersubjectivity, interaction, intercommunication, and language are simply presupposed as the unclarified foundation of these theories. They assume, as it were, that the social scientist has already solved his fundamental problem, before scientific inquiry starts." 

— Alfred Schutz, 1953 

‘Rather than a mind and a body, a human is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things’.

-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

Harvey Sacks lectures, from February 16, 1967 (on 'settings’). p. 17.

“One of the things we want to move to, as an ultimately interesting thing, is -- let me put it this way.

You could imagine that everybody who isn't in the Jet Set would find the world boring.

And to be sure, some people who aren't in the Jet Set find the world boring.

But it's apparently the case that you don't have to be in the Pentagon Chart Room all the time to find that the world is full of interesting things to do, to see, talk about, notice, consider, explain, etc, and that a group of four kids who get together for two hours Saturday morning, among other things that they do, find that adequate.  And that whatever they know about the world, whatever formulations of its units, participants, etc., can be done there.  In that sense all settings, we'd like to see, are equivalent.  In the sense that whatever you can do in one you can do in

others, in some sense.”

Proust, time, events. 

"Mme Verdurin did not give "dinners," but she had "Wednesdays." Her Wednesdays were a work of art. While knowing that there was nothing to equal them elsewhere, Mme Verdurin introduced fine distinctions between them. "This last Wednesday wasn't up to the one before," she would say. "But Ithink the next'll be onethe most successful I've ever given." She sometimes went so far as to confess: "This Wednesday wasn't worthy of the others. In return, I've got a big surprise for you the one after that." In the final weeks of the season in Paris, before leaving for the country, the Patronne would announce that the Wednesdays were ending. It was an opportunity to spur on the faithful: "There are only three Wednesdays left, there are only two more," she would say, in the same tone of voice as fi the world were about to end. "You're not going to let me down next Wednesday for the closure." But this closure was a sham, for she would warn them: "Now, officially, there are no more Wednesdays. That was the last for this year.  But I shall be here all the same on Wednesdays. We'll have Wednesday among ourselves. Who knows? These little intimate Wednesdays wil perhaps be the pleasantest. At La Raspalière, the Wednesdays were necessarily restricted, and since, according as some friend had been met with when passing through and had been invited for one evening or another, almost every day was a Wednesday." 

— Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 251. 

"Knowing thyself does not mean knowing something very private, it means knowing oneself as a member of a community, knowing, that is, the things that obtain for one, which obtain for persons commonly. Heraclitus's fragments and Socrates' certainly had such an intention, and they did not involve knowing something about one which was distinctive, or special, or private.

The moral order provides one with the things not only which properly affect, control one's behavior, but with the materials in terms of which one can come to know oneself, and in doing so, know anyone else, and in doing so, be accessible to others. Thence, the hopes that may be attached to the phrase, or the program, 'know thyself.'" 

—  H. Sacks, Lectures, 1992: vol. 1, pg 221. 

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. 

-Jorge Luis Borges 

"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction … for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it."

G. Chesterton -- The Club of Queer Trades (1905).

I suspect Harvey Sacks would have liked this quotation.  RE: his doubt that our imagination can keep up with the detailed aspects of real interaction. 

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