Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very privileged and honored to have as my guest, one of my favorite contemporary

writers and thinkers, actually, Oliver Sacks. He has one brand new book and one recent book

that will be the centers of our discussion. The new book is called Wahaka Journal. It's published

in the National Geographic Direction series. The slightly less new book is Uncle Tungsten, Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood.

It was published by Knopf.

The journal, the Wahaka Journal, was written during and on the occasion of a fern gathering trip into southern Mexico.

Dr. Sacks had mentioned to me in the past that he had a passion for ferns.

And I'm going to begin by asking Dr. Sacks to read a passage from the journal

because I want you, the listener, to watch the play of habits of attention as the prose

moves and forms associations. This is Oliver Sacks reading from Wahaka Journal.

The doorways between the palace rooms are low and made lower by the steel braces which have been inserted to support them.

But the ceilings, the tops of the walls, have exquisite complex geometrical figures.

I copy some of these into my notebook, tessellations, ramparts, like the visual fortification

patterns one may get during a migraine, and complex hexagonal and pentagonal patterns. I'm reminded of patterns in

Navajo rugs or moorish arabesques. Normally, one of the more silent members of the group,

who am I to speak up and so erudite a group, I am stimulated by the geometric figures around us

...