In “Swimming with Oliver,” a memoir/essay about my twenty-yearfriendship with Oliver Sacks (to be published this coming Spring in the Colorado Review), the following passage occurs:

On the way back from [a driving tour to] Canada, we discusspossible titles for Oliver’s nearly-finished memoir. He likes “The Garden of Mendeleev,” but worries that not enough people know who Mendeleev was. We come up with alternatives, including two inspired by Goethe, who wrote, “The mind, too, has its erection...