The children, in particular, were so at home in the water that they appeared, in the words of one explorer, more like fish than human beings. Magellan and other navigators reaching Micronesia in the sixteenth century were astounded at such skills and, seeing the islanders swim and dive, bounding from wave to wave, could not help comparing them to dolphins.
Everyone there swims, nobody is unable to swim, and the islanders’ swimming skills are superb. I was reminded of this when I visited the Caroline Islands, in Micronesia, where I saw even toddlers diving fearlessly into the lagoons and swimming, typically, with a sort of dog paddle. Swimming is instinctive at this age, so, for better or worse, we never learned to swim.
Our father, who was a swimming champ (he won the fifteen-mile race off the Isle of Wight three years in succession) and loved swimming more than anything else, introduced each of us to the water when we were scarcely a week old. We were all water babies, my three brothers and I. Everything in Its Place gives us an intimate portrait of a master writer and thinker at work. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks’s love of the natural world – and his last meditations on life in the twenty-first century. In several of the compassionate case histories collected here, Sacks considers for the first time the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia, and in others he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette’s syndrome, ageing, dementia, and hallucinations. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer's? What is social media doing to our brains? In this spirited volume, Oliver Sacks examines the many passions of his own life – both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence, and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. From the bestselling author of On Gratitude and On the Move.
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