"They can not be here forever"

My eye surgeon works hard, as 

a 2nd year Fellow at the Univ-

ersity hospital, an élite desig-

nation for the most promising

residents, who will not remain. 

I met him in an emergency last 

Sunday, 3 visits ago, and wrote

about it then and again, not ex-

pecting to do so today. I asked

him yesterday, if he could take

a weekend off this week, and he

said, no. It is, he said, the

birthday of his daughter, and he

has not been able to go shopping

for her, and will miss most of

her day.

To me, of course, this is ter-

rible. In a way of changing the

subject, I told him I had just 

been reading about an automobile

for him, out in the waiting room

as my pupils were turbocharging.

Yes, I said, it is made by VW

but it is called a Bugatti Vey-

ron (by pure sentiment, as in Ab-
ercrombie and Tummy), and it 
is very fast. He has no free 
time, he needs a way to extract 
what others derive, more quickly

and with greater concentration.

He said, Ah, I used to love Los

Angeles; I could drive 90 miles

per hour, everywhere. Everybody

does, he said; and the only real

problem is when you miss an exit.

I told him I could well imagine

this, and that I'd grown up in a

town so small in Los Angeles, it

didn't have an exit of its own.

Were you at UCLA, I asked. No,

at SC; and I said, oh, my,

I was so close, in San Marino.

Oh, so you are a Californian,

then, and I know I smiled when

I said, yes. I always do; and

he was smiling, too, remember-

ing South Pasadena.

Then he said, you know, my daugh-

ter was born in Huntington Hos-

pital. (This is an establishment

akin to everything named Hunting-

ton in that small world, every-

thing of the name being in San

Marino, but for the grande dame,

the neighborhood hotel, in Pas-

adena). That's where I was born,

I lighted up, as if subscribing

to membership in an obscure and

tiny team; but such things are

important to children, when they

learn about them. He said, yes,

my daughter was born there on

07/07/07, and he was sparklingly

pleased about that, too.

And what is her name? Nahla, he

said, spelling it out for me,

and I could envision a bright

and pretty little feminine ver-

sion of himself, a little Syrian

girl of infinite dark eyes. She

must be very proud of you, and

understand why you are away from

home a lot. She knows I am an eye

doctor, he said, allowing that

she was happy about that.

Then he said, his mother and his

father were there, but that they

would be leaving for Syria on Mon-

day. I said, oh no, it is very 

dangerous, as if this small detail

might have eluded a busy fellow.

Yes, he said, he knows he might

not see them again. But they can

not be here forever, it is home.

Happy birthday, precious Nahla.

ii  Photography Beth Nelson

     2011

Ernest as a parlour game?

Tassos Paschalis

   

    I haven't any interest in seeing 

    the new edition of A Farewell to 

    Arms being played as a publicity 

    coup, a conspiracy of the auth-

    or's heirs and his Princeton-bred

    publisher (now subsumed in S & S), 

    to keep his name in lights. But,

    with the new edition offering 

    some 47 of the known variants 

    which the writer considered 

    for ending the novel, it's on-

    ly innocently true, that once 

    again scholarship resembles a 

    parlour game for dinner parties

    in a Whit Stillman demographic.

    
    I don't think I'll play; I ad-

    mire that he wrestled the thing

    to ground at all, never mind how

    well. Not every excision from a
    draft manuscript is probitive,
    except of being unchosen. An un-
    used phrase is not rejected, it
    is unused. But the cardinal fact,
    underlying everything else tend-
    ing toward caution in the use of
    such manuscripts, is what a flim-
    sy compass the stoutest of them
    is, for what had flickered through
    and behind the creative screen.

    Our best guide to precisely that
    making, is what he had chosen to
    say before: each choice, in him,
    reinforcing terms of notorious
    "simplicity." Pretty cool? There
    is our game, far above the deftly
    fallen waistband and the archly
    rugged buckle of our stance, in-
    side the eye that's blinded by
    the retina that pulls away from
    focus in the strain of being con-
    sistent. To haul our story to the
    ground calls now upon that memory
    which is the raw act, revisited
    through the flow of blood. Then
    do they read.

    

    
































iii  Jeremy Young

Somebody may have found a particle, it seems

    

    Oh, very well. But I do not

    wish to see a habit made of 

    it. Now, run along and change.

I don't remember all these loops, before

Same tree, 

     year after year?

And now July

I can't deny, this has been an

amusing Sunday in the mode of the

recent past. While shaving this mor-

ning, I found myself endeavouring

to splash from a corner of my left

eye an apparent bit of English cock-

er hair, resembling a small dollop

of seaweed as I blinked the water

from my eyes. It turned out not to

be superficial, but something swirl- 

ing about in one's vision pool,

so to speak. After showering and

dressing, and refreshing my ban-

dagings for a surgery previously

reported, I thought to call a 

friend's mother, in medicine in

town, who said, oh yes, floaters;

of course, that could mean a

detached retina; you probably

ought to have it examined.

Not one's plan for the day.

Telephoning the ophthalmologist

on call for this Sunday at the

University hospital, I was cor-

dially invited in for a glimpse,

given that I could be there in

a few minutes and the day was

not terribly busy. 

In this entry I do mean to affirm

a boy's fascination with optics -

or rather, at least my boyhood fas-

cination, whether this is a prov-

ince of boys or not. I have a 

thing for lenses and their en-

thralling properties, their clev-

er behaviours, their offerings of

resolution. I admit, a large bit

of my interest in photography is

shamelessly devoted to exploiting

the delight of playing with glass.

Within a couple of hours, I was

back on my way home, having had

two tears in my left retina treated

by laser optics, to re-affix this

vital little tissue to the optical

wall where nature originally laid it.

I could not be more pleased to have

had this telephone conversation with

my friend's mother, whom I called

immediately thereafter, with an in-

vitation to come on out to this 

farm and take up residence for a 

while, just to notice what else 

might be escaping my notice of de-

tachment. 

Do you know what happens when

people speak to each other, divided

by a million dollars worth of optics

but no more than four or five inches

of space? I noticed, in a smashingly

exotic optical array from Berne,

Switzerland (exquisite machining),

an effect on the voice which the

lenses really do account for, in

part; and I noticed it again, in

the laser panoply of optics from

(can you believe it) Italy. First,

precision optics impress upon the

organs of discourse a great quiet

of concentration and an enormously

calmer rhetorical flow. Second, 

their existence as a barrier per-

mits the tenderest and softest

tones to intervene because the

impersonal aspect of the exchange

is so expensively protected.

Do you know this feeling, as you

focus your camera? You may very well

know it, macrophotographically, as I

do. But you may also know it from

framing a portrait; and you exper-

ience this envelopment in caring as

an element not merely of precision,

but of selection.

If no one living, knows about you

in this world, you may synthesise

this relationship with the inter-

vention of optics. I have always

felt a great debt to the optics I

was born with, however, and I was

glad that for the moments in which

their use lay in the balance, other

lenses configured a rapport I could

hear and with which, by the grace 

in part of their genius for intim-

acy, I can read in my own sight.