Sacks - Oaxaca Journal

Acclaim for Oliver Sackss
OAXACA JOURNAL

Light and fast-moving. Among the botanical and anthropological observations, one catches glimpses of Sackss inner life: his preoccupation with dualities, his nearly Victorian sense of modesty, his fascination with the world around him.

The New Yorker

Like all the best journals, it has a rich immediacy, a sense that we share the moment of the authors perceptions. Since Sacks is such a lovely writer, and he and his fellow travelers such fonts of knowledge about everything from Mexican history to Mayan culture to chocolate making to the workings of fern evolution, the book is a rare treat. It makes you want to strap on your field glasses and catch the first flight south.

The Globe and Mail

Relaxed yet observant. [Sackss] thoughtful, sometimes wistful ruminations, no matter how expansive they may grow, are always rooted in the concrete details he has observed. Those who read Oaxaca Journal will appreciate Sackss own diligence as an observer and his skill in translating the wonders of the material world into words.

Los Angeles Times

Oaxaca Journal whipped up my appetite for a visit to Mexico, as the best travel writing does.

The Providence Journal

The combination of his insatiable curiosity and rigorous scientific observation makes him an excellent travelling companion. Mexico past and present emerges from these bursts of association and digression. With so much of the world made superficially familiar by tourism, Oliver Sackss dogged pursuit of the exotic is especially welcome. He has, moreover, succeeded in striking that elusive balance of input between traveler and culture that makes for good travel writing.

Times Literary Supplement (London)

Bittersweet and profound. Truly a lovely book.

Chicago Tribune

Oliver Sacks is a practicing physician and the author of more than ten books, including Musicophilia, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film). He lives in New York City, where he is professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and the first Columbia University Artist.

www.oliversacks.com

BOOKS BY OLIVER SACKS

The Minds Eye

Musicophilia

Oaxaca Journal

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

The Island of the Colorblind

An Anthropologist on Mars

Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

A Leg to Stand On

Awakenings

Migraine

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2012

Copyright 2002 by Oliver Sacks, M.D.
Map copyright 2002 by National Geographic Society
Illustrations copyright 2002 Dick Rauh

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Originally published by National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., in 2002.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

eISBN: 978-0-307-94758-1

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

For the American Fern Society
and for plant hunters, birders, divers, stargazers,
rock hounds, fossickers, amateur naturalists
the world over.

I used to delight in the natural history journals of the nineteenth century, all of them blends of the personal and the scientificespecially Wallaces The Malay Archipelago, Batess Naturalist on the River Amazon, and Spruces Notes of a Botanist, and the work which inspired them all (and Darwin too), Humboldts Personal Narrative. It pleased me to think that Bates, Spruce, and Wallace were all crisscrossing in one anothers paths, leapfrogging, on the same stretch of the Amazon during the selfsame months of 1849, and to think that all of them were good friends. (They continued to correspond throughout their lives, and Wallace was to publish Spruces Notes after his death.)

They were all, in a sense, amateursself-educated, self-motivated, not part of an institutionand they lived, it sometimes seemed to me, in a halcyon world, a sort of Eden, not yet turbulent and troubled by the almost murderous rivalries which were soon to mark an increasingly professionalized world (the sort of rivalries so vividly portrayed in H. G. Wellss story The Moth).

This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public. It was the sense of such an atmosphere that drew me to the American Fern Society in the first place, and that incited me to go with them on their fern-tour to Oaxaca early in 2000.

And it was the wish to explore this atmosphere which, in part, incited me to keep a journal there. There was much else, of course: my introduction to a people, a country, a culture, a history, of which I knew almost nothingthis was wonderful, an adventure in itselfand the fact that all journeys incite me to keep journals. Indeed, I have been keeping them since the age of fourteen, and in the year and a half since my visit to Oaxaca, I have been in Greenland and Cuba, fossil hunting in Australia, and looking at a strange neurological condition in Guadeloupeall of these travels have generated journals, too.

None of these journals has any pretension to comprehensiveness or authority; they are light, fragmentary, impressionistic, and, above all, personal.

Why do I keep journals? I do not know. Perhaps primarily to clarify my thoughts, to organize my impressions into a sort of narrative or story, and to do this in real time, and not in retrospect, or imaginatively transformed, as in an autobiography or novel. I write these journals with no thought of publication (journals which I kept in Canada and Alabama were only published, and that by chance, as articles in Antaeus, thirty years after they were written).

Should I have prettied up this journal, elaborated it, made it more systematic and coherentas I was to do with my book-sized Micronesian and leg journalsor left it as written, as with my Canadian and Alabaman ones? I have, in fact, taken an intermediate course, adding a little (on chocolate, rubber, things Mesoamerican), making little excursions of various sorts, but essentially keeping the journal as written. I have not even attempted to give it a proper title. It was Oaxaca Journal in my notebook, and Oaxaca Journal it remains.

O. W. S.

December 2001

I am on my way to Oaxaca to meet up with some botanical friends for a fern foray, looking forward to a week away from New Yorks icy winter. The plane itselfan AeroMexico flighthas an atmosphere quite unlike anything Ive ever seen. We are scarcely off the ground before everyone gets upchatting in the aisles, opening bags of food, breast-feeding babiesan instant social scene, like a Mexican caf or market. One is already in Mexico as soon as one boards. The seat-belt signs are still on, but nobody pays any attention to them. I have had a little of this feeling on Spanish and Italian planes, but it is far more marked here: this instant fiesta, this sunny laughing atmosphere all round me. How crucial it is to see other cultures, to see how special, how local they are, how un-universal ones own is. What a rigid, joyless atmosphere there is, in contrast, on most North American flights. I begin to think I will enjoy this visit. So little enjoyment, in a sense, is permitted these daysand yet, surely, life should be enjoyed?