Read Vintage Sacks for Free Online Page A

concerned to wish away an unpalatable truth. The situation had similarities to what had occurred twenty years before, when cortisone was clothed with unlimited promise; and one could only hope that with the passage of time, and the accumulation of undeniable experience, a sense of reality would triumph over wish.
    Was my letter too condensed—or simply confusing? Did I need to put things in the form of extended articles? With much labor (because it went against the grain, so to speak), I put everything I could in an orthodox or conventional format—papers full of statistics and figures and tables and graphs—and submitted these to various medical and neurological journals. To my amazement and chagrin, none was accepted—some of them, indeed, elicited vehemently censorious, even violent, rejections, as if there were something intolerable in what I had written. This confirmed my feeling that a deep nerve had been struck, that I had somehow elicited not just a medical, but a sort of epistemological, anxiety—and rage. 5
    I had not only cast doubt on what had appeared at first to be the extremely simple matter of giving a drug and being in control of its effects; I had cast doubt on predictability itself. I had (perhaps without fully realizing it myself ) hinted at something bizarre, a contradiction of ordinary ways of thinking, and of the ordinary, accepted picture of the world. A specter of extreme oddness, of radical contingency, had come up—and all this was disquieting, confounding, in the extreme (“These things are so bizarre that I cannot bear to contemplate them”—Poincaré).
    And so, by mid-1970 I was brought to a halt, at least so far as any publication was concerned. The work continued, full of excitement, unabated, and I accumulated (I dared to think) an absolute treasure of observations and of hypotheses and reflections associated with them, but I had no idea what to do with them. I knew that I had been given the rarest of opportunities; I knew that I had something valuable to say; but I saw no way of saying it, of being faithful to my experiences, without forfeiting medical “publish-ability” or acceptance among my colleagues. This was a time of great bewilderment and frustration, considerable anger, and sometimes despair.
    This impasse was broken in September of 1972, when the editor of
The Listener
invited me to write an article on my experiences. This was going to be my opportunity. Instead of the censorious rejections I was used to, I was actually being invited to write, being offered a chance to publish, fully and freely, what had been accumulating and building up, dammed up, for so long. I wrote “The Great Awakening” at a single sitting—neither I nor the editor altered a single word—and it was published the following month. Here, with a sense of great liberation from the constraints of “medicalizing” and medical jargon, I described the wonderful panorama of phenomena I had seen in my patients. I described the raptures of their “awakenings,” I described the torments that so often followed; but above all, it was
phenomena
which I was concerned to describe, with a neutral and phenomenological (rather than a therapeutic, or “medical”) eye.
    But the picture, the theory, implied by the phenomena: this seemed to me to be of a revolutionary sort—“a new neurophysiology,” as I wrote, “of a quantum-relativistic sort.” These were bold words indeed; they excited me, and others—although I soon came to think that I had said too much, and too little. That there was
something,
assuredly, very strange going on—not quantality, not relativity, but something much commoner, yet stranger. I could not imagine what this was, in 1972, though it haunted me when I came to complete
Awakenings,
and rippled through it constantly, evasively, as half-tantalizing metaphors.
    The article in
The Listener
was