'I'd Like to See a Face Sometime'

Some of the saddest words I know in all of literature:

“And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I must forbear: . . .”

On this date, May 31, in 1669, Samuel Pepys ceased writing his diary after nine and a half years. He was losing his eyesight and feared that writing his diary would hasten blindness. No wordsmith, Pepys was a practical-minded English administrator, a shrewd political animal who served as a member of Parliament and as Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under Charles II and James II. The pleasure of reading his diary is the pleasure of observing the life of an eminently gifted but fairly conventional man. There’s nothing heroic about Pepys. He never thought of himself, bless him, as an artist. After abandoning the diary, he would occasionally dictate brief passages but disliked the loss of privacy. He lived another thirty-four years and even served in Morocco in 1683 during the English evacuation.

Modern physicians have retroactively attempted to diagnose Pepys’ vision problems. In 2002, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a fascinating article speculating on the nature of Pepys’ vision loss and how it might be treated today. “The Big Brown Eyes of Samuel Pepys” is densely detailed but makes for good reading. Here is the authors’ conclusion summarized:      

“We conclude that the origin of Pepys' asthenopia was multifactorial: a low amount of uncorrected hypermetropia and astigmatism, convergence insufficiency with near exophoria, nonspecific low-grade ocular inflammation that was exacerbated by alcohol, paranasal sinus inflammation contiguous with or referred to the eye or orbit, a contributing functional element, and an obsessional personality.”

Among writers, Pepys is hardly unique. Think of Homer, Milton and Joyce. The true laureate of blindness is Borges, the librarian and reader of everything. Here is the Miltonically titled “On His Blindness” (trans. Stephen Kessler, The Sonnets, 2010): 

“At the far end of my years I am surrounded

by a persistent, luminous, fine mist

which reduces all things to a single thing

with neither form nor color. An idea, almost.

The vast and elemental night and the day

full of people are both that cloudy glow

of dubious constant light that never dims

and lies in wait for me at dawn. I’d like

to see a face sometime. I don’t know

the unexplored encyclopedia, the pleasure

of all these books I recognize by touch,

the golden moons or the birds of the sky.

The rest of the world is for others to see;

In my half-light, the habit of poetry.”

[ADDENDUM: “Keeping a Diary” by Dick Davis, from the new poem section in Love in Another Language (Carcanet, 2017):

“Whoever’s fumbled, flattered, wed, or dead,

Pepys writes to end the day, ‘And so to bed.’

And since whatever happens, seet or grim,

“These days I end the day by reading him,

“Before my book drops and my body sleeps,

My sign-off phrase is now, ‘And so to Pepys.’”]