It happens almost every day: A friend, an acquaintance or a complete stranger confides in me about a past struggle that only a few people in his or her life are privy to, about physical pain or emotional turmoil that almost nobody sees.
It happened just the other day. Someone who’d always struck me as a portrait of unflappable confidence and unforced buoyancy told me for the first time about a medical misfortune that he suffered decades ago and repercussions from it that linger.
I was surprised by the details of his hardship but not by the fact of it. His story is my story. My story is many people’s stories. Our outward calm veils inner turbulence. Much of the confidence we project is a camouflage we perfect.
And when you admit to that, you’re blessed with others’ admissions. You join an informal community of people eager or at least willing to embrace the messy and liberating truth.
I joined it after suddenly losing some of my eyesight several years ago, being told that I might go blind and then writing about that. My account seemed to resonate with readers in part because my condition exemplified a public-private disconnect.
Nothing about my composure or appearance suggested trouble. I met my deadlines. I honored my obligations. My eyes looked the way they’d always looked. But they didn’t act the way they’d always acted. Never again would I read as fleetly and fluidly as before. Never again would I type with as much ease and as few errors.
That was the bad part. The good? Never again would I trust that I knew anything important about someone — or, really, anything at all — from what was evident on the surface.
I understand in a new and important way that struggle isn’t exceptional. It’s inevitable. It’s endemic. It’s our default setting. It’s just often hidden, and I wonder what life would be like if we all walked around wearing sandwich boards that listed what we’re enduring. What we’re surviving. What we’ve overcome.
That was the gist of an excerpt from my new book, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,” that The Times published on Tuesday. (To add to that today, here’s a corresponding portion of the audio version of the book.)
“I went to bed seeing the world one way. I woke up seeing it another.”
Frank Bruni reads an excerpt from his new book, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found.”The excerpt comes from a chapter of “The Beauty of Dusk” titled “The Sandwich Board Theory of Life,” which posits that our moments of self-pity would be rarer and our capacity for empathy stronger if we knew the full truth of the people around us. Sometimes we simply can’t, but sometimes it’s a matter of looking more closely, listening more attentively, signaling an openness to that knowledge, asking the right questions. It entails a shift in perspective and a heightened awareness.
Much has been written about the psychological impact of the honeyed lives that people project on Instagram, Facebook and other social media. Everyone’s at a party to which you haven’t been invited. Everyone’s children are excelling, everyone’s cakes are rising, everyone’s trip to Grand Cayman or the Grand Canyon was heaven on earth.
But that’s only one set of dispatches and one way to read them. I take in different, or at least additional, information. I notice when the CNN anchor John King, who exhibits such preternatural poise and split-second decisiveness in front of those color-coded maps on election night, reveals that more than a decade ago, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“I remember like it was yesterday,” he said in an article by Emily Strohm in People magazine in November, mentioning “the first look at the M.R.I. and the lesions that look like little dried flowers running up the spinal cord and nerves.”
“I was petrified,” he said. And he has lived ever since with the question of whether those lesions might someday impair him.
I hear the “cancer” buried in a long story that someone is telling about her past and realize that while the word is rushing by for most listeners, the reality didn’t rush by for her and the fear of its recurrence is probably still present.
I welcome the stories shared with me — by the record producer who, at the peak of his career, lost hearing in one ear, jeopardizing his livelihood, or by the Vietnam veteran who sometimes feels acutely self-conscious, all these decades later, about the prosthesis where his lower leg used to be. They’ve been met with mighty challenges, but those trials aren’t obvious to most of the people around them.
And I accept that my compromised, imperiled vision isn’t some extraordinary thing. It’s just my thing.
For the Love of Sentences
Among the many witty responses to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s confusion of “Gestapo” with “gazpacho,” one by Noel Casler, a stand-up comedian, stood out: “Sure the Gazpacho Police are bad but the elite Vichyssoise inspired puréed terror.” (Thanks to Ramin Dowlati of Danville, Calif., for nominating this.)
As best I recall, I had never received a nomination that cited the magazine America, a Jesuit publication, so I was delighted to get this, regarding an article by Jim McDermott: “When we hold on to a story too tightly, or identify with it too fully, the gift we have been given becomes the god we worship. What was a source of liberation becomes our new jail. We’re Gollum screaming for our Precious.” (Diane Dugan, Philadelphia)
From The Guardian, here’s Marina Hyde on Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson: “As loyalists keep explaining, the P.M. is ‘rebooting’ his Downing Street operation. I love the idea that this full-scale meltdown can somehow be rebooted. Like standing in the ruins of the reactor building at Chernobyl and going, ‘Have you tried switching it off and on again?’” (Allan Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif., and Eric Eales, Kelowna, British Columbia)
From the NPR website, here’s Glen Weldon, noting that his current television-watching habits recall those of some 20 years ago, when he was “working in bookstores” and “trying to make mock turtlenecks happen for me.” “All those bookstores I used to work in have closed,” he added. “Also I’m bald now, so mock turtlenecks just make me look like roll-on deodorant.” (Susan Sawatzky, Colorado Springs)
From The Atlantic, here’s Jennifer Senior about a withholding friend: “Her life was always fine, swell, just couldn’t be better, thanks. Talking with her was like playing strip poker with someone in a down parka.” (Susan Dixon, Kennewick, Wash., and David Schaps, Bnei Brak, Israel)
From The New Yorker, here’s Margaret Talbot on Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her ideological allies: “The America of 2022 is quite plainly not a country where citizens’ ability to worship freely is in jeopardy. Nor is the nation on the cusp of canceling gun rights. Yet the conservative justices often act as if they were alone in a broken elevator, jabbing the emergency button and hollering for help.” (Sally Corden, Madison, Wis., and Pete Browne, Kansas City, Mo.)
From The Washington Post, here’s Damon Young in his debut column in the newspaper’s magazine, about getting doxxed by white supremacists: “If you’re sincerely paralyzed by the insipid monotony of existence, and feel like an arbitrary assemblage of galactic flotsam scudding toward the sweet nothingness of death, and need an anchor to remind you of the preciousness of life, try Be Black, Get doxxed.” (Kennetha Bigham-Tsai, East Lansing, Mich., and S.R. Cohen, Baltimore)
Finally, The Times! Here’s Wesley Morris on weeping at the movies: “What I’d felt was the ancient power of art to make a puddle of us. ‘E.T.’ led me into a love affair with being made to cry among strangers in the dark. I almost typed ‘being reduced to tears,’ except where is the reduction? Crying for art is an honor, an exaltation, a salute. It’s applause with mucus and salt.” (Jo Wollschlaeger, Portland, Ore., and Mary Allman-Koernig, Port Charlotte, Fla.)
Here’s Molly Young on the new book “Love in the Time of Contagion” by Laura Kipnis: “For three of the book’s four essays, scooting around Kipnis’s mind feels like eating the world’s finest trail mix: no dud raisins to shift aside, only M&M’s and the fancier nuts.” (Barbara Buswell, Oakland, Calif.)
And here’s Maureen Dowd, wittily connecting President Richard Nixon’s nickname for some of his key aides with reports that President Donald Trump may have stuffed important papers into the toilet: “Nixon had the plumbers. Trump’s the one who needed them.” (Karen Shectman, Pittsboro, N.C., and Stan Seltzer, Trumansburg, N.Y., among others)
To nominate recent bits of writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.
Department of Accountability
In the newsletter two weeks ago, I wrote about the cats in my past and mentioned Cupid, a male one, identifying him as a calico. Many of you wrote to me to suggest that I was almost certainly misguided, as calicos are very rarely male. (Some of you said that they’re never male, which contradicts this Business Insider article.) So was Cupid an oddity? I don’t know. I wrote “calico” based on a vague visual memory of him and was unaware of how specific the reference is. Cupid probably wasn’t an honest-to-goodness calico. But he was special all the same! My apologies for any sloppiness.
Many of you also wrote to chide me for another matter of misidentification, noting that I used the word “rhymes” for near rhymes in the most recent edition of For the Love of Lyrics. I was speaking — or, rather, writing — informally, and assumed that most readers would understand. But, yes, “man” and “land” don’t rhyme in the strictest sense.
Only one of you took issue with my use of “factoid” in last week’s newsletter. But that one of you — David Mayo of Fukuoka, Japan — had a point. “The word ‘factoid’ doesn’t mean a little fact, the way an asteroid is a little planet,” he wrote, noting that it denotes “the kind of false information that’s widely accepted as fact” and is analogous to “humanoid versus human being.” He’s right about its origin, though its meaning has apparently evolved to permit my deployment of it. He added: “For a little piece of accurate information, we may have to coin a word like ‘factette.’” So coined — but I’ll let him circulate it first.
He continued: “As I write, the Cincinnati Bengals have gone ahead on a 75-yard touchdown pass, and you’re on your way to being hailed as the second coming of Jimmy the Greek.” That was in reference to my prediction in the same newsletter that the Bengals would win the Super Bowl, and I have clearly emerged as the second coming of nothing more than another dreamer in thrall to the underdogs (or, in the Bengals’ case, undercats). I hereby own that — with pride.
On a Personal Note: Where You’ll Find Me
A book is a kind of sequential tease. Every time you think you’re done, you’re not. You type the last word of the manuscript, attach the document to an email to your editor, press Send and breathe a titanic sigh of relief: Finished! At last!
Except you’re not. Not even close. Your editor has suggestions (which turn out to be a godsend) and questions (ditto). Proofreaders have more questions (and thanks for those, too). In the case of my new book, there were probably more proofreader questions and corrections than ever before. My odyssey with my eyes gave me a story to tell but made the telling of it — the typing of it — more difficult and prone to error. Joseph Heller would have appreciated that.
Then the box of 20 complimentary hardcovers lands at your front door, and there are still miles to go. If you’re lucky, booksellers, podcast hosts and others invite you to talk about your book. I am very lucky and will be doing some talking and want to share when and where with you. While a fuller, continually updated list exists on my website, here are some highlights:
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At 4 p.m. Eastern today, John Dickerson of CBS News and I will be talking live on Twitter (in what’s called a Twitter Space) about the book and more. You can listen in by going here, or you can find the conversation later through my Twitter profile or his.
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Talk about pinch-me territory: Next Tuesday evening (Feb. 22), I’ll be chatting with Oprah Winfrey for one of her “The Life You Want” classes — on the subject of vulnerability — on the Oprah Daily website. If you’re a subscriber, you can tune in here.
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In Manhattan on March 2, my Times colleague and dear friend Maureen Dowd will join me for an in-person and virtual event at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center.
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In Washington, D.C., on March 4, John King of CNN — who, as I mentioned earlier in this newsletter, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis more than a decade ago — will join me for an event at the Union Market location of Politics and Prose.
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In Carrboro, N.C., on March 7, Molly Worthen, who contributes frequently to the Opinion section of The Times, will join me for an event at the ArtsCenter.
Apart from discussions of the book, I’ve been asked to deliver the commencement address this May at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When I graduated in 1986, I certainly didn’t foresee this. Life metes out some brutal shocks. But also some lovely surprises.
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