A Personal Eclipse

Temporary blindness leads to new sight.

The day I walked into a signpost on South King Street was the day I realized I was going blind. My vision had been cloudy for some time, but in the weeks prior to this painful realization it had been getting progressively, alarmingly worse. As many do in the face of an unwelcome decline in fortune or health, I had chalked it up to a temporary condition, in my case likely caused, I thought, by spending too many hours staring at manuscript pages and computer screens. But it’s hard to argue with a signpost, and a trip to the optometrist dispelled my remaining denial: “This is serious,” the optometrist said. “I’m referring you to an ophthalmologist.”

Two days later, I was seated with my face pressed against a machine, answering questions coming from the other side of a blinding light. “Do you have a family history of early cataracts?” the doctor asked. “I don’t think so,” I replied, “but I can’t be sure.” More lights, more questions: “Were you given corticosteroids as a child? Did you spend a lot of time in the sun?” My childhood seemed as far away and foggy as everything else had recently, and I apologized for not being much help. “No matter,” the doctor said, switching off the lights. “You have posterior subcapsular cataracts, and you’ll need surgery.”

The timing of this diagnosis was most unwelcome. I was in the middle of writing a book with a hard deadline, and surgery would mean delays. I decided to put the procedure off, giving myself time to finish writing. I also thought it wise (especially given my age and the length of time I’d hopefully be needing my eyes) to interview surgeons and research the different lenses available to replace the ones I had been born with. The cataracts, however, had no intention of cooperating with this delay, and life grew blurrier day by day. It wasn’t long before the pages of my manuscript retreated into a gray otherworld, hidden behind an opaque veil.

I purchased voice recognition software and had it installed on my computer. This should be easy, I thought. I’ll just dictate the book and get it off to the editor before I go in and get my new eyes. (Simple!) The old pad and pen were laid aside. On went the computer, on went the headset, but my ability to find a single worthy word had been turned abruptly off. Absolutely nothing came. My story was completely lost to me. Unreachable. Gone. I searched but there was nothing there. It was a surreal moment. I remember sitting at my desk late into the night, staring as if from undersea at the muted glow of a Word doc on my computer screen. I could make fuzzy lines of text appear by speaking, but I knew my editor would have no interest in the frustrated ramblings of a writer who had lost his mind along with his sight. I sat for hours—thinking, searching, thinking. Then it hit me: maybe thinking was the problem.

Most of my writing is done with pen on paper, other times I type. But no matter the method, the act of writing is what seems to produce the writing itself. The hand moves, and the words appear, each word calling forth the next, each sentence leading to the sentence that follows, and it builds on itself like some strange and autonomous string of enzymes born from the mysterious workings of a mythic cloud that flows like current through the arm, through the hand, and onto the page. There is no thinking involved. In fact, thinking cuts the connection and kills the very thing being sought.

And if writing is not the same as thinking, neither is it the same as speaking. I’ve met people who speak in perfectly structured utterances, as if reciting from a prewritten speech. I am not one of them, and I find discourse with these people to be inauthentic and somewhat unsettling. The humanness of conversation is found in the stutters and stumbles and long pauses spent searching for words, pauses filled with the movements of facial muscles and bright flashes of iris or momentary passing of clouds across the eyes. It is found in the silently breathing shirt of your best friend beside you on a bench. It is often found more in what is unspoken than what is actually said. But this is not writing. This can be written about, of course, I’m doing it now, but conversation does not translate to the page. It is something entirely different.

I soon discovered that the only way I could carry on with my work through this period of blindness was to close my failing eyes and visualize in my mind a sheet of paper and my hand writing out the words. I didn’t narrate. I didn’t speak. I didn’t think. Instead, I imagined myself writing and then read aloud to my computer what I saw myself write. It seems to me now, looking back, that an entirely different part of the brain is used when writing, and it can only be accessed by the physical act of the writing itself. These insights were welcome, of course, but I found them an unfair trade for actually seeing. Fortunately for me, my blindness was temporary, just an interesting personal eclipse, not eternal night.

With my manuscript finally finished, I lay down at last on the University of Washington operating table beneath a theater of lights and watched as the shadows of lab coats vacuumed the lens from my eye. In an instant my blurry world was made clear. Too clear. Everything was now unfiltered and in equal focus and there was too much information coming in and too much light. The desire to shut it out was overwhelming, an instinct to retreat back into the darkness, I suppose, but the mechanical contraption damming my lids prevented me from closing my eyes. The panic was manageable thanks to a wise nurse’s insistence that I take the offered pre-surgery Valium, but it occurred to me while drifting in and out of that diazepine delirium, that I was saying goodbye to the last part of myself that was truly me. The original me anyway. Our cells turn over throughout our lives, the old dying to be swept away and replaced by the new, but this is not true of the lenses in our eyes. They form in the womb of special elongated cells and are carried with us in their original form—focusing the world, filtering the light, watching everything else about us as we age change slowly in the mirror. And now they, too, are gone. I thanked these lenses for their long service to me, and, as so many things that have outlived their purpose ought to be, I bid them farewell and let them disappear from my sight, committing myself to plunging into the future ahead, moving forward, looking not to the darkness but eyes wide open straight into the light.

I have new intraocular lenses now and my vision is better than I recall it ever being before. I am very grateful. Grateful for the optometrist. Grateful for the surgeon. Grateful that I was not born in a time when the only option was to risk ruining the eyes by pushing the calcified lenses out of the way with a sharpened stick, as peoples of the ancient world often had to do. Grateful that I discovered the saints at The Himalayan Cataract Project where for $25 dollars I can give the gift of sight to someone less fortunate who would otherwise be blind; someone carried from their village to a tented clinic for a simple surgery, after which they walk home unaided to see the welcoming faces that had been lost so long in the fog. I can think of no other modern miracle performed at so affordable a price, especially after getting the bill for mine.

Along with the gift of sight I was given a few insights, too. Insights about myself and the workings of my mind. Insights about my writing. And I’ve learned that when you truly remove the plank from your own eye, you no longer have any need to see the specks in the eyes of your fellows. You can look right past all that and see the innocent child behind, unchanged by time, the child inside all of us as we struggle through the big bright world—living, loving, longing; all equally suffering in our own ways, but each and every one of us stumbling around in the immense beauty of it all, doing the best we can, searching for a light out of the darkness, seeking our unique purposes, albeit somewhat clumsily and somewhat blind. There is more to learn, I know. And more to write. But there is time. And now I see.

Taken in 2017 on our drive, during the Great American Eclipse.

An audio recording of this essay can be found here:

Audio: A Personal Eclipse