Oliver Sacks M.D. - Oaxaca Journal

Praise for Oliver Sackss
O AXACA J OURNAL

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

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

VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2012

Copyright 2002 Oliver Sacks
Map copyright 2002 National Geographic Society
Illustrations copyright 2002 Dick Rauh

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2012, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in the United States of America by National Geographic Books in 2002. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

www.randomhouse.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Sacks, Oliver W.
Oaxaca journal / Oliver Sacks.

eISBN: 978-0-307-40216-5

1. Sacks, Oliver W.-Travel-Mexico. 2. Ferns-Mexico. 3. Oaxaca (Mexico : State)-Description and travel. I. Title.

F1391.O12S23 2012 587.3097274 C2011-903365-8

Cover design by John Bristow

Image credits: (Fern) Plamen Petkov

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