Thinking in the Margins

In addition to the many books Oliver Sacks wrote, according to the late neuroscientist’s partner Bill Hayes, were the hundreds of handwritten journals he filled over the course of his life. But those represented only the latter two stages of Sacks’s generative thinking; earlier in the process came the voluminous annotations he made to books he was reading. For The American Scholar, Hayes writes about the process of going through all those notes upon Sacks’s death, and meeting an entirely new side of his departed love.

During our time together, I never saw Oliver annotating a book, and he never spoke about the habit; I don’t think he gave it a second thought. This was just the kind of reader he was: He would spontaneously jot down his reactions, his inner thoughts, in the margins—left, right, bottom, top—or on the endpapers or title pages, often using colored felt pens (red, green, purple, blue), sometimes switching colors on the same page. Oliver’s annotated books began piling up in tower after tower on the floor; ultimately, I found around 500 of them. I felt like I had uncovered a beautiful secret; I knew that I must be the first person (other than Oliver himself) to be reading these long-forgotten thoughts and ideas. Sometimes a book was filled with annotations, cover to cover, and sometimes just a few lines prompted him to take pen to page.