Author Lawrence Weschler struck up a friendship with author Oliver Sacks back in he late 70s and the two wrote to each other for years.
After some time, Sacks had agreed to let Weschler write his biography, and Weschler filled 14 notebooks about their meetings and conversations. But after a while the story got too personal, so Sacks asked Weschler to drop the project.
The 81 year-old Sacks revealed that he has a terminal form of liver cancer in a heart felt piece in The New York Times back in February. In light of this development, Sacks agreed to let Weschler share some of their early stories and diary entries in Vanity Fair. Read an excerpt after the jump.
When we first meet I tell him he does not look the way I expected. “My physical look changes radically over time,” he replies. “Sometimes I’m bearded; sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I weigh 190 pounds; sometimes I weigh 300.” (“That must be some beard,” I say.) He is currently somewhat closer to 190. He has severe back problems, the result of several accidents (“worldly infelicities”), and when we go to dinner, a brief walk to a nearby fish restaurant, he carries along a square flat pillow (“something of a cross between a prosthesis and a transitional object”).