First a feeling of dry, itchy tiredness. Too much staring at a screen. The next day even drier, itchier. Too little sleep. And then, waking up with eyelashes glued together with pus explains what’s been going on in the corners of my eyes.
Always when falling ill I begin to contemplate the possibility of never recovering from this particular illness. (Just like falling in love, falling ill always appears unprecedented, new, world-changing.) Now, there is something very romantic in loosing eyesight. Milton dictating out of his blindness. Woolf’s suicide in the face of its approach. And yet how little of what I do every day I could go on doing sightless. The more ironic since I spend much time each day reading and thinking and writing about the sounds of words, their sonic texture as inexpressible counterpoint to meaning. But how cold the consolation of wordsound seems when the ink on the page is gone, blotted out. Can listening replace the pleasures of type? Or the balance of printed and blank space on a page? Can the restlessness of flipping forwards, counting pages that remain to be read be expressed in minutes? Or the joy of finishing the last page just as the train pulls in at the station also be found in the silence at the end of a recording?
Reading is also listening in one’s own head.
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 