English · Chapter 15
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Oliver Sacks (1933 to 2015) was a British neurologist and writer who spent most of his working life in the United States. He was born in London to parents who were both doctors, studied medicine at Oxford, and became world famous for books that combined clinical case histories with deep human sympathy, among them Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and the memoir Uncle Tungsten. "On Libraries" appears in Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales (2019), a collection of essays published after his death. It is a short personal essay in which Sacks traces his life through the libraries he loved, and it ends with his sorrow at seeing books discarded in the digital age.
Sacks begins in childhood. His favourite room in the family home in London was the library, an oak-panelled room lined with bookcases holding the books of his parents, both physicians, along with the collections of his older brothers and volumes gathered over generations. As a small boy he was free to take down whatever caught his eye, and he read widely and eagerly, drawn especially to books on the natural world, astronomy and chemistry. He remembers that formal schooling did not suit him; being taught in a classroom felt passive and constraining, while in a library he could follow his own curiosity and educate himself. The library, not the school, was where his real education took place.
The next library in his life was the public library in Willesden, near his home, where he spent many hours as a boy. Here again the essential pleasure was freedom. He could wander among the shelves, take down any book, and move from subject to subject as one book led to another. Much of what he learned about science before university he learned there.
At Oxford, Sacks discovered two very different libraries. The Radcliffe Science Library gave him access to the scientific literature he needed as a medical student. The Bodleian, one of the oldest libraries in Europe, gave him something else: the thrill of handling books that were centuries old and of finding volumes that had scarcely been read for generations. He describes the excitement of holding history in his hands and of realising how much lay waiting in the stacks for anyone willing to browse.