The anatomy of perception (2)
Having assurance only because we see with our whole sight, it puts us into surprise and suspense when another with his whole sight sees the opposite . . . For we must prefer our own lights to those of so many others, and that is bold and difficult.
When the scholar’s eyesight fades, what good are his books? His library turns as unreadable as Lascaux: scriptless drama of shapes on the walls of a cave, the artifice unglossed within the viscera where the quarry – tissue of allusions – still bristles with bookmarks. That flux of the world of becoming: to capture is to kill it. Decipherment leads to loss. The dance must be primary, he wrote.
I acted briefly as amanuensis, lent him my eyes for a paper he had to give. Bending to my task, I felt of little use, a cheap fiction. My West Coast accent flattened the words he loved, robbed them of shadows – like trading embossed leather covers for a paperback spine. Perhaps he sensed, even then, the germ I carried on my youthful breath, insidious as any misty paraphrase, corrosive as hope.
For this section, I borrowed a story from Dale, who was responding in turn to Susan’s question about the senses. Once again, the epigraph is from Pascal, and the subject, as in Dale’s story, is the late critic Cleanth Brooks.