“Solely artwork penetrates what pleasure, ardour, intelligence and behavior erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow insisted in his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There’s one other actuality, the real one, which we lose sight of. This different actuality is at all times sending us hints, which with out artwork, we will’t obtain.”
It’s a lovely sentiment, lovely and incomplete. Artwork is however a method of contacting that deeper actuality. Science is one other, with its revelations of truths so past sight that they appear inconceivable, from the billions of neutrinos passing via your physique this very second to the hummingbird’s flight to the quantum bewilderment of the subatomic world.
However greater than artwork, greater than science, now we have invented one implement to chop via the curtain of behavior and render the world new. Love alone blues the sky and greens the grass and brightens all the sunshine we see. It’s the final irreducible actuality, whose thriller no portray or poem can totally seize and no fMRI can totally clarify.
In 1965, the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) moved from Los Angeles, the place he had simply completed a graduate program at UCLA, to New York, the place he was supplied a put up at Albert Einstein Faculty of Drugs. He discovered the town a spot of “unbelievable inventive furor,” however his painful introversion and sense of distinction left him feeling friendless.
That summer season, simply earlier than starting his new job, he traveled house to London. Whereas in Europe, he met Jenö Vincze — a charismatic Hungarian theater director dwelling in Berlin. Oliver had been planning to go to a neurology convention in Vienna. As a substitute, he discovered himself in Paris, in Amsterdam, in love with Jenö. Right here was a rigorous and authentic scientist, who would dedicate his life to illuminating the neurological underpinnings of our strangest psychological states, immediately subsumed within the strangest and most mysterious of all of them. He would later look again on this time as one in every of “an intense sense of affection, dying, and transience, inseparably combined.”
When he reluctantly returned to New York, Oliver set about making an attempt to bridge the abyss of bodily absence by rendering his world alive in phrases, composing a few of the best love letters I’ve learn. In one of many treasures collected in his posthumously printed Letters (public library), he writes:
My dearest Jenö:
I’ve clutched your letter in my pocket all day, and now I’ve time to write down to you. It’s seven o’clock, the ending of an ideal day. The solar is mauve and crimson on the New York skyline. Mirrored from the cubes and prisms of an Aztec metropolis. Black clouds, like wolves, are racing via the sky. A jet is climbing on a protracted white tail. Howling wind. I like its howling, I wish to howl for pleasure myself. The bushes are thrashing from side to side. An outdated man runs after his hat. Darker now. The solar has set, Metropolis. A black diagram on the sombre skyline. And shortly there’ll be a billion lights.
He isn’t, after all, describing the town as it’s however as he’s. This, ultimately, could also be what love is — the billion lights inside that make the entire world luminous, an interior solar to render each uninteresting floor and each darkish house radiant:
I don’t really feel the gap both, solely the nearness. We’re collectively all of the whereas. I really feel your breath on the facet of my neck… My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness. I smile like a lighthouse in all instructions. Everybody catches and displays my smile.
[…]
I wish to share my joys with you. To see the inexperienced crab scuttling for the shadow, translucent egg instances hung from seaweed. Just a little octopus, simply hatched, jetting for pleasure within the salty water. Sea anemones. The delicate candy strain if you happen to contact their middle. The chalky arms of barnacles. And polychaetes of their splendid liveries (they remind me of Versailles), transferring with insensate grace. And dive with me underneath the ocean, Jenö. Via fish, like birds, which settle for your presence. And scarlet sponges in a hidden cave. And the liberty, the whole and utter freedom of movement, second solely to that of house itself.
Oliver yearned to move Jenö not solely to the world he walked via however to the world inside, the world he would at all times finest entry and finest channel in writing. “The act of writing,” he would mirror a lifetime later, “is a particular, indispensable type of speaking to myself.” Now, he tells his beloved:
I learn Psalms in profanity, for the enjoyment they comprise, and the belief and the love, and the pure morning language… I write a lot. I wish to catch every little thing and share it with you. You’ll be disadvantaged of all of your social life, your sleep, your meals, condemned to learn interminable letters. Poor Jenö, dedicated to a lover who’s by no means silent, who talks all day, and talks all night time, and talks in firm, and talks to himself. Phrases are the medium into which I need to translate actuality. I dwell in phrases, in photos, metaphors, syllables, rhymes. I can’t assist it.
Time and again, he retains returning to this new high quality of sunshine immediately revealed by love:
The climate has been of supernal magnificence. The day steeps every little thing in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe within the night, with an exquisite amber mild flooding via the doorways and home windows: big, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you must be nice, loopy, or wildly in love… I by no means noticed that golden mild earlier than we met in Paris.
Maybe it was this brush with the irreducible immensity of affection that will later lead Oliver to write down so presciently concerning the limits of synthetic intelligence and so poignantly concerning the which means of our human lives.
Two days later, he writes once more:
I like you insanely, but it’s the sweetest sanity I’ve ever recognized. I learn and reread your great letter. I really feel it in my pocket via ten layers of clothes. Its belief, its heat, exceed something I’ve ever recognized… I consider we’re each infinite, Jenö. I see the longer term as an countless enlargement of the current, not the remorseless tearing-off of calendar leaves.
Like all folks in love, Oliver was envisioning a life with Jenö, not as soon as imagining that they’d by no means see one another once more, that he would spend the following thirty-five years celibate and afraid of affection, afraid of himself in love.
However love would discover him ultimately — a phenomenal and shiny love that will maintain him via dying with dignity.
