My mother showed Oliver to her study where he spent the next several days typing hectically until he had fashioned the raw manuscript for what would become his very first book, Migraine. At some point, he asked my mother, Lily, whether he could borrow her portable typewriter for a few minutes to write a quick note. During lunch, he quietly emptied the dinner table and then the refrigerator. One day in the summer of 1967, Oliver was in London for a few weeks and came over for what he said would be a quick bite. Oliver Sacks in Greenwich Village, 1961, with his new BMW R60 motorbike. That became his bailiwick and mission in life: he would tell their stories to the world because they needed to be told. He aspired to shine a light on madness, mental illness, unusual disorders, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the forgotten.

Ultimately, however, and probably like Einstein, worldly matters and affairs didn’t really concern him. Indeed, Oliver used to boast that he hadn’t read a newspaper since 1947, but actually, he was quite well informed. Rarely would our discussions involve business or politics. He was a natural, compelling raconteur and a person of extraordinary knowledge, high intellect and humanism. He peppered his observations and dialogue effortlessly and unaffectedly with quotes from philosophers, poets and writers on science and the humanities spanning 2,500 years. His turns of phrase were rich and memorable in simile, metaphor, irony and humour. Oliver possessed an immense vocabulary and was exceptionally expressive and eloquent in ordinary, everyday conversation. However, he had much to say about his patients and their illnesses and disabilities he was their defender and advocate from early on. In contrast to my late father, David, Oliver’s elder brother by nine years, who was stentorian, sartorial and effervescently self-confident, Oliver was stuttering, shambolic and diffident, and spoke quietly, hesitantly and sometimes not at all. He strode in without a shudder and swam off steadily like a whale with me in tow as a small, shivering porpoise. With his vast build, Herculean strength and suitable layer of natural blubber, the frigid water was always the perfect temperature for Oliver. I braved freezing waters in outdoor pools around London in order to be able to spend time with him. He also loved water, swimming great distances daily.

He periodically sent us postcards and photos of his exotic motorbike rides into the California deserts and mountainous sierra, triggering a deep longing in me to live there – which I did, following in his footsteps, 20 years later.

Awakenings by Oliver Sacks