Thinking in the Margins

When Oliver Sacks and I first started seeing each other romantically in the spring of 2009—the year I moved to New York City—every time we met up, he would give me a photocopy of an essay he’d published in the past, often in an obscure journal, not in one of his books. Oliver was quite shy, and this was his way of inviting me in, letting me get to know him better.

Like most people, I had known him primarily as the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia, best-selling collections of neurological case histories, and I remember being struck by the wide range and differing tones of the “occasional” pieces he shared with me. There was “Colorado Springs Revisited,” for instance, a bittersweet memoir about his motorcycle travels across America as a 27-year-old in 1960, and “The Elephant’s Gait,” an essay that drew on his deep knowledge of the history of photography. Sometimes Oliver gave me forewords he’d written for others’ books, or chapters prepared for medical textbooks I would never otherwise have seen. He’d inscribe them with little messages of affection and appreciation for me.

I have several folders full of these pieces, each dated and signed, which I rediscovered shortly after he died of metastatic cancer on August 30, 2015, at age 82. In the process of emptying out the apartment that we shared, I found them in a drawer where I’d also stashed photos I’d taken of Oliver, tape recordings he’d made, and a box in which he’d saved cards and letters I’d written to him.

Anyone who has lost a partner, spouse, or family member knows what it is like to sort and give away, or throw away, or decide to save all of the things the deceased person has left behind. It can be excruciating, and it can, sometimes, bring great joy. Having gone through this already, after my partner of 17 years, Steve, died unexpectedly in 2006 at age 43, I knew well enough not to rush the process, but to follow my gut; it would all get done eventually.

The most daunting task I faced was to sort Oliver’s personal library—around 10,000 books housed in custom-made, floor-to-ceiling bookcases lining nearly every wall of the apartment. Books meant everything to Oliver; they were his only material indulgence. Moreover, reading shaped his thinking, which shaped his philosophy about medicine, which shaped his writing, which shaped his sense of himself.

I sorted the books in stages. As Oliver had instructed me before his death, I first gave a few selected volumes to friends and some of his botany works to fellow members of the American Fern Society. But that still left a hell of a lot of books on the shelves. I couldn’t find an institution interested in taking Oliver’s entire library, and I couldn’t possibly keep it all myself.

I decided to weed out books he likely had not read—some of the dozens of books sent to him yearly by publishers seeking a blurb—and to pick out those I wanted to keep for myself. One day, I got up on a chair to reach a top shelf and began turning pages until, thousands of books and many months later, I reached the end of my task. Along the way, I discovered something astonishing: Oliver had been a prolific annotator of books—marginalia, notes to himself, critical comments, and so on. I’d had no idea of the extent of this practice and how far back in his life it went—to his university days at Oxford in the 1950s.

During our time together, I never saw Oliver annotating a book, and he never spoke about the habit; I don’t think he gave it a second thought. This was just the kind of reader he was: He would spontaneously jot down his reactions, his inner thoughts, in the margins—left, right, bottom, top—or on the endpapers or title pages, often using colored felt pens (red, green, purple, blue), sometimes switching colors on the same page. Oliver’s annotated books began piling up in tower after tower on the floor; ultimately, I found around 500 of them. I felt like I had uncovered a beautiful secret; I knew that I must be the first person (other than Oliver himself) to be reading these long-forgotten thoughts and ideas.