Footnotes

I never realised until today that the James brothers (William & Henry, not Jessie & the gang) had no sense of music at all. William only makes a single reference to the enjoyment of music in all his voluminous writings on psychology and it simply doesn't enter into Henry's novels. I'm taking this on trust from an aside in Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia, but he's a writer whom I'm only too happy to put my trust in, as I would, no doubt, have the greatest of faith in him as an outstanding physician if I were ever in a position to need his ministrations.

Which I hope I'm not - because this is a doctor who deals in extremes, cases at the edge, as it were, of what the brain is capable of, and, sadly often, rendered incapable of. As with the other books of his I've read (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and Seeing Voices - oddly I have the impression of reading more because of reviews I've come across of his other stuff and seeing him in several documentaries, and I really must make in-roads into his entire oeuvre) I find myself moved, intrigued and simply frightened by the case studies in Musicophilia in roughly equal degrees. You come away from Dr. Sacks with an enhanced sense of our vulnerability to all sorts of insults to the matter of the brain and much admiration for those who deal with often appalling situations with extraordinary courage.

And you also learn a lot. This is not the first edition of Musicophilia and, as with his other works, Sacks gradually accumulates all sorts of fascinating 'extras', often in the form of footnotes. His footnotes make thought-provoking reading in themselves, opening out new conjectures, pointing in directions not necessarily considered in the main body of the text. I get the impression they reflect the workings of the doctor's own mind - never quite still, always alert to new possibilities, exploring avenues that cannot quite be assimilated by our current understanding of how things are. That understanding, in Sacks's work, is always provisional anyway.

So how do we account for the complete lack of interest in music in the James brothers? Sacks doesn't provide any kind of easy answer and I suppose that's the point. The world becomes a little more fascinating, a little less easy to account for through the simple awkwardness of this fact. Indeed, Musicophilia begins with a meditation on how strange it is that any of us should like music at all, and an awareness of the sheer oddness of music as an experience in itself.