The preservation of self: that could be the motto for all of Sacks’s writing on neurological disorders. The so-called normal case is highly contingent, he seems to be saying, depending on the physical integrity of the brain beneath, and in what we refer to as the abnormal case we are still dealing with a self in the fullest sense. There is always an “I” there, someone to whom things matter; so long as there is consciousness at all, there is a subject of that consciousness. Even if you can’t tell your wife from a hat, there is still a you that must deal with this disability. Ultimately, then, Sacks’s clinical case studies are exercises in love and respect.

From Colin McGinn’s NYRB piece on Oliver Sacks’s new book about music.

Off topic but on subject, I rented a guitar yesterday. I went in for a banjo but couldn’t bring myself to do it. The two I could afford weren’t any good. So, for a very small amount of money, I have an Ovation around the Portland apartment now.