We science-medicine-poetry junkies, along with a sizeable chunk of the world’s population, are mourning the death of Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author who died last Sunday from metastasized melanoma. And as enthusiasts of Dr. Sacks’ catechisms on the soul of the patient, we turn to his own words of mourning, written over 40 years ago for his close friend, the poet WH Auden:
Wystan’s departure affected me like a sudden darkness, the eclipse of all light and reality from the world. I knew him to be a man mortally ailing, and when he left [the U.S.] I mourned his death in advance. I suddenly realized what I had never properly avowed before, that he had been a beacon for me, a reality-bearer, so that his departure subtracted reality from my world… and there is a Wystan-shaped space which will never be filled.