By Stuart Mitchner

“If I live.” These words translated from the Russian can be found at the end of nearly every dated entry in the 1895-1899 journals of Leo Tolstoy, who was born on this date, September 9, in 1828, and died at 82 on November 20, 1910. I wonder what Oliver Sacks, who died at 82 ten days ago, would make of Tolstoy’s daily acknowledgment of his mortality. Sacks’s maternal grandfather, who fled Russia at 16 to avoid being drafted into the Cossack army, might know. Perhaps it was nothing more than an abbreviated prayer. After “If I live” July 31, 1896, Tolstoy is quite literal, writing later the same day: “I am alive. It is evening now. It is past four. I am lying down and cannot fall asleep. My heart aches. I am tired out. I hear through the window — they play tennis and are laughing.”

Short, simple statements of fact. You can almost hear him breathing.

While the most familiar image of Tolstoy may be the photograph from 1908 of a white-bearded patriarch seated on a rattan chair, one leg crossed over the other, very much the ruler of his domain, I prefer the word-pictures by his neighbor in the Crimea, Maxim Gorky, who used to see him along the coast, “a smallish, angular figure in a gray, crumpled, ragged suit and crumpled hat … sitting with his head on his hands, the wind blowing the silvery hairs of his beard through his fingers.” This sounds more like the man who would write “If I live” and “I am alive” in his journal. But then, in the same paragraph, Tolstoy becomes “the old magician” in whose “musing motionlessness” Gorky feels “something fateful, magical, something which went down into the darkness beneath him and stretched up like a search-light into the blue emptiness above the earth.”

In a Nov. 17 journal entry from 1897, Tolstoy writes, “Why not suppose that all of us are particles of consciousness of other higher beings, such as we are going to be?”

Watching Tolstoy on the shore, Gorky imagines that “the stones will begin to move and cry out, everything around him will come to life, acquire a voice, and speak in their different voices of themselves, of him, against him,” and Gorky thinks, “I am no longer an orphan on the earth so long as this man lives on it.”

The Car That Runs On Music

After reading the essays in Vintage Sacks (2004) in the week since his death, I’ve been pondering whether the renowned neurologist would have had any clinical interest in someone who believes his Honda CRV hears and responds to the music playing on its sound system. Named Moby after Herman Melville’s whale, my soulmate has come back to me alive and well, you could even say reborn, after a week and a half in Gino’s Auto Body Shop. Sacks could title our case history The Man who Mistook his Car for a  — what? Creature? Sentient being? Or Cat — if it has to rhyme with Hat, as in someone hip to everything that “aspires to the condition of music.”

Not since the day Moby was brand new, fresh off the Honda lot in fall 1999, has he shone with as richly deeply polished a Sherwood Forestness of gleaming greeness as he did after the artisans at Gino’s performed major cosmetic surgery on his right rear flank. Thanks to them, he’s been delivered from the humilating damage done by the sideswipe he suffered two months ago making a left turn on Rt 518 from Rt 206.

Were I actually consulting with Dr. Sacks, I might deny that I really down-deep think that Moby has feelings and that car and owner have bonded in the human or spiritual sense of the word, nor would I testify in court that Moby’s performance on the road has anything to do with the CD of the moment; nor did I, in fact, tell the traffic court judge in Hillsborough that at the time of the accident the music playing, “Father Time” by the Finnish speed metal group Stratovarius, was racing along at the sonic equivalent of 500 miles an hour, which may be why I cut a left thinking I could avoid the white Lincoln rocketing hellbent through that infamous intersection.

Tolstoy to the Rescue

The more I read of Sacks, the more I think he’d condone this symbiotic man-music-machine relationship, since music so often plays a transformative role in his work, and given his Russian ancestry, it’s no surprise to find him occasionally communing with the author of War and Peace. When the 41-year-old neurologist was stranded alone on a mountain in Norway with a badly broken leg and night coming on, he summoned up Tolstoy’s story about a man who undergoes a spiritual awakening after bringing a peasant back from the brink of hypothermia by lying on top of him. Sack’s memory of the story comes with a line from the Bible: “Two are better than one … for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.” For Sacks, the “other” was the belief that Tolstoy was keeping company with him as he splinted his leg with an umbrella and slid down the precipice, finding his way with the aid of “melody, rhythm, and music.” Previously, he’d “muscled” himself along; now he was “musicked along … guided by a sort of marching or rowing song, sometimes the Volga Boatmen’s Song,” sometimes a “monotonous chant” of his own.

Little Songs

Tolstoy shows up again in the title piece of Sacks’s most famous book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, about Dr. P., a musician and music teacher who once did actually reach for his wife’s head thinking it was his hat, and who when in the street “might pat the heads of water hydrants and parking meters, taking these to be the heads of children.” Sacks uses Tolstoy as a way of determining whether his patient’s “internal visualisation” was equally deranged: “Thinking of the almost hallucinatory intensity with which Tolstoy visualises and animates his characters, I questioned Dr P. about Anna Karenina. He could remember incidents without difficulty, had an undiminished grasp of the plot, but completely omitted visual characteristics, visual narrative, and scenes.” According to Dr. P’s wife, he was able to get around in his dysfunctional state “by making little songs about what he is doing — dressing, washing, or eating. If the song is interrupted he simply stops, till he finds in his sensorium a clue on how to proceed. This cantatory method of compensating allows P. to function undetected in his professional and personal life.”

Need I say how nicely this idea chimed with the state of mind of the man who mistook his car for a music lover? The method in my madness is nothing if not cantatory. Dr. P. found his way through the world as Moby and I find our way through the world, with music.

The Other Moby

Moby’s namesake and Herman Melville’s great-great-great-grand nephew Richard Melville Hall, was born, as it happens, 50 years ago this Friday, September 11. I knew nothing of his music until a day or two after I purchased my CRV when my curiosity about the other Moby led me to slide the disc of his 1995 album Everything Is Wrong into the CD player. As I’ve written in previous columns, the CRV’s pick up had been a trifle disappointing in the early days, especially when faced with the steep upgrade on 518 just north of Rocky Hill. As soon as “Feeling So Real,” which is nothing less than recorded ecstasy, began playing, Moby swallowed that hill in one great roaring gulp. That’s when I knew I was driving a very special machine.

This same Richard Melville Hall, who helped Dr. Sacks with a music therapy program called the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, tells an interviewer from Origin magazine “that music was a nice thing that I enjoyed and liked making, but it wasn’t a serious healing modality. What Dr. Sacks has proven is that music is actually a quantifiable, profound healing modality.”

All I know is my Moby drives as well at 114,000 miles as he did the day we crested that hill. And the music on a recent trip to Doylestown and back, the first since the crash, sounded glorious.

Credits

I used the 1917 Knopf edition of The Journals of Leo Tolstoy 1895-1899, translated and introduced by Rose Strunsky, who knew Tolstoy and remembers “the deep-set eyes and the shaggy eyebrows of that all-knowing seer, as he sat on the verandah of his home in Yasna Polyana one May afternoon in 1906.” The Maxim Gorky quotes are from his Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Andreyev (Dover Publications 1946).