Observer Review: Uncle Tungsten By Oliver Sacks Essay, Research Paper

Even as a boy, Oliver was always in his elements…Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical BoyhoodOliver SacksPicadorWhen Oliver Sacks was five he was asked what his favourite things in the world were. He responded: ‘Smoked salmon and Bach’. Surrounded by a phalanx of scientific uncles and aunts in north London, yet left pretty much to his own devices, his was a childhood marked with sadness and exhilaration in equal measure.Uncle Tungsten blends the history of passionate scientific inquiry and Sacks’s own idiosyncratic awakening with a skilful narrative hand. His inspiration and focus, Uncle ‘Tungsten’ Dave owned a light bulb factory on the Farringdon Road and instilled awe into the young Sacks of this ‘perfect’ metal; its astounding properties, its absolute resilience.’ “Feel it Oliver” he would say, thrusting a bar at me. “Nothing like it.” ‘ Thus began what Oliver perceived to be a ‘lifelong love affair’. He cared intensely for the physical world and the unseen forces and core metals that bind it. Of religion he was less certain – although having listened to a lyrical passage in the Talmud itemising the odours and spices that went with a sacrifice he concluded that ‘it was evident that God had an acute nose’.In 1939 aged six, he was evacuated to Braefield, a London school reconstituted in the country by a tyrannical master. The war is viewed indirectly, through a concentration of subjective childish anguish. Disoriented and battered, Sacks was disturbed by what he perceived as flaws in his visual memory upon his return from Braefield – in reality, landmark buildings had been bombed. He taught himself the processes of photography in an attempt to try to make ‘a fugitive perception permanent’, to capture atoms in place before they shifted. Tungsten, at least, was ’stable in a precarious world’.His abiding passion was still for chemistry: noxious reactions, the properties of elements, the beauty of Mendeleev’s periodic table. This last, with its elegant simplicity, restored a sense that man might, after all, be equipped to ‘read the mind of God’. Residual anxiety left over from Braefield that ’some special awfulness might be reserved for me, and that this might descend at any moment’ lent an urgency to his empiricism and there was no stopping him – he even collected bus tickets marked from H 1 to U 92 in order to possess symbols of every known element: ‘It gave me the sense that I had the whole universe, its building blocks, in my pocket’.Sacks’s already well-developed morbidity was enhanced by the inexplicable actions of his obstetrician mother; she would bring home malformed foetuses she had drowned at birth and insist he dissect them.The memoir ends with adolescence. Sacks mourns its encroach, writes it as an expulsion from the garden of numbers. He longed to know Mendeleev, who looked like ‘Fagin or Svengali’ and read his Principles. He found that ‘his book, his life, did not disappoint me. He was a man of encyclopedic interests’. He could be writing of himself – rarely can emotional isolation have produced such a passionately engaged soul.