162 pages
Published 2002
Read from May 4 to May 5
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
For much of my life before college (and again lately, as my social skills grow rusty and my natural introversion reasserts itself), I considered myself an outsider, peering in on the "normal" social lives of easy extroverts with a mixture of longing, puzzlement, and cold superiority. I didn't know how to make friends -- before college I wasn't sure I could make friends, aside from one or two special cases, usually nurtured through electronic communication -- so I imagined myself as a modern hermit, a technological anchorite watching the world at large from my lofty, lonely digital perch.
It is strange to think of someone so distinguished as Oliver Sacks -- respected neurologist, bestselling author (even I, so poorly read behind my façade of erudition, have read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), fellow of the American Association of Arts and Letters -- could be equally withdrawn and timorous in company, a brother in unhappy, unsatisfied, but ultimately intractable reserve. Ostensibly, this is a book about ferns, a journal of Sacks' pteridological field trip to Oaxaca with the largely amateur enthusiasts of the American Fern Society. But Sacks' journal is tempered with melancholic reflections on his own reclusive yet yearning nature:
I have a special feeling for these botanical couples who are both spouses and working partners.... I have also observed -- I was a little slow to see it -- two lesbian couples, and one gay couple, in our group. Very stable, long-term, as-if-married relationships, solidified, stabilized, by a shared love of botany. There is an easy, unselfconcious mixing here of all the couples -- straight, lesbian, gay -- all the potential intolerances and rejections and suspicions and alienations transcended completely in the shared botanical enthusiasm, the togetherness of the group.
I myself may be the only single person here, but I have been single, a singleton, all my life. Yet here this does not matter in the least, either. I have a strong feeling of being one of the group, of belonging, of communical affection -- a feeling that is extremely rare in my life, and may be in part a cause of a strange "symptom" I have had, an odd feeling in the last day or so, which I was hard put to diagnose, and first ascribed to the altitude. It was, I suddenly realized, a feeling of joy, a feeling so unusual I was slow to recognize it. There are many causes for this joyousness, I suspect -- the plants, the ruins, the people of Oaxaca -- but the sense of this sweet community, belonging, is surely a part of it.
This mingled sadness and unexpected, abstruse joy was the heart of this otherwise straightforward travel narrative, breathing life into every botanical encounter, every afternoon spent Hemmingwaying it with his journal book at a café in the town's zócolo. This year I've discovered an unsuspected love for botanical books, so I would undoubtedly appreciate Oaxaca Journal without this emotional context, but the familiarity of Sacks' feelings, this one-way fraternal bond his words articulated for me, made this read a special, intimate experience, an elusive quality perhaps symbolized in Sacks' recurring inability to catch ephemeral scenes of fortuitous beauty with his camera.
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