Oliver Sacks

I remember the first time I saw the movie Awakenings.

I was living at Jeff Street Baptist Center and working with a community of inner-city teenagers from the Clarksdale housing projects in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Monday nights were dollar movie nights for us, and we would load up in our orange van (affectionately called The Great Pumpkin) and head out to the theater. 

On that Monday night I chose 'Awakenings' as our movie of the week, hoping that my kids would identify with the 'helping each other overcome' theme in the story. 

My dream was deferred. 

They hated it! 

What teenager WOULD love a movie about people suffering from encephalitis lethargica, the devastating sleeping sickness of the post WW I 1920’s, and the doctor who cared for them?

(Well, me, but that’s another story.)

Within 15 minutes of the start of the movie they were throwing popcorn at the screen! 

We got up and changed theaters to a movie with more action.

I had to promise to check my movie choices with them before they agreed to go with me again.

I loved that first fifteen minutes of Awakenings, though, and went back to the theater to see the whole movie by myself the next night. 

I identified with Dr. Oliver Sacks (played by Robin Williams) and the compassion, commitment and creativity he showed his patients.

I saw myself in the way he came home from the chronic hospital where he served and poured himself into the study of the little known plants he tended in his sparse apartment. 

I felt the community of his dedicated friends around him.

I understood why the movie received 3 Oscar nominations, one for best actor (Robert DeNeiro for his role as Leonard), one for best picture, and one for best writing of a screenplay adapted from a book. 

I read the book Awakenings by Oliver Sacks soon after I saw the movie.

I wandered and wondered into the literary and neurological worlds of one of the finest writers and doctors of our time. 

He taught me to picture people (and the characters in stories I’m working on) as worlds - landscapes of being in which they reside. 

And that picturing of worlds requires an active exploration of images and views, a continual jumping-about and imaginative movement instead of a static and systematic formulation. 

I love the image 'landscape of being.’

It helps me see people as if they are a Vincent Van Gogh painting.

It helps me see people with beauty, genius, wonder and courage.

It helps me see myself in that way, too.