The Listener
As Oliver Sacks observes the mind through music, his belief in a science of empathy takes on new dimension.
Once again, Sacks was saved by the sudden appearance of song. As he was struggling with physical therapy—and growing increasingly frustrated—his mind was inexplicably filled with the resonant strings of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. “In the moment that this inner music started,” Sacks recounts, “the leg came back. With no warning, no transition whatever, the leg felt alive, and real, and mine.” Sacks would later describe his vivid hallucinations of the Concerto as a kind of miracle, in which the music “descended like grace,” reminding him of his own “kinetic melody.” The song had restored him to himself.
