Icons From the Age of Anxiety: Comedian and Actor Robin Williams(1951-2014)

Do not go gentle into that good night

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

From the New Yorker Culture Desk

August 18, 2014

The Man Who Could Be Anyone

By Oliver Sacks

One of the most amazing experiences of my life was working with Robin Williams, watching him become me, in the filming of my book “Awakenings,” in 1989. The patients whose experiences I had recounted in the book—some of them were still alive then—loved him, too. Over the next twenty-five years, Robin and I became good friends, and I grew to appreciate—no less than the brilliance of his wit and his sudden, explosive improvisations—his wide reading, the depth of his intelligence, and his humane concerns.

Once, when I gave a talk in San Francisco, a man in the audience asked me an odd question: “Are you English or are you Jewish?”

“Both,” I replied.

“You can’t be both,” he said. “You have to be one or the other.”

Robin, who was in the audience, brought this up at dinner afterward, and, using an ultra-English, Cambridge voice laced with Yiddish and Yiddish aphorisms, gave a stunning demonstration of how one could indeed be both. I wish we could have recorded this marvellous flower of the moment.

Robin had thousands of voices, and faces, and personae. He could become Lon Chaney, Hamlet, Dr. Strangelove, Mae West—or all of them in a single sentence. Indeed, he could become any animal. When we had lunch together a few months ago, we got to talking about reptiles—Robin had had a pet iguana—and he combined a zoologist’s knowledge of lizards and turtles with an inner understanding of what it was like to be them, and he could imitate their postures and behavior to perfection. Imitate is too mild a word; he became them as, in “Awakenings,” he became me.

I sometimes joined the Williamses in the summer at Lake Tahoe. I would go for long swims in the lake, with Robin paddling next to me in a kayak. We would chat about neurology and biology, literature, history, biographies—he was startlingly well informed on pretty much everything under the sun, and this was a very different Robin—thoughtful, relaxed, not onstage, not “on.”

In addition to all his gifts, Robin was the kindest and most generous of men. William James, the great nineteenth-century psychologist, was called “that adorable genius.” For me, more than anyone I have ever known, Robin, too, was that adorable genius. It is infinitely sad that this unique human being, who gave so much and so fully of himself to all of us, should have taken his own life.