"Six feet tall, with silver hair, Sacks has an unlined, mournful, luminous face. In his youth, he was an Olympic-level swimmer; he is still fit enough to swim two miles a day in the ocean off Martha's Vineyard, where he lives with his wife of twenty years, the poet Jorie Graham. Sacks swims even in winter, wearing a wetsuit, breaking through the ice that sometimes lines the shore. In New York, he swims in a pool in Battery Park City; when we met at his studio in Tribeca, he had just swum his miles. It was a little after lunchtime, and sun filtered grayly through the skylights. He took a notebook down from a high shelf - he has kept notebooks ceaselessly since he was very young - and began leafing through it." He was born in 1950 in South Africa. New Yorker Paywall.

Edited: 03/21/2019 at 01:03 AM by ww