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Wednesday, August 8, 2018

My Rebellious Eyes

My eyes have now become so bad that I'm finding it impossible to read the news in the morning, as I am accustomed to doing. Perhaps this is the  higher powers' answer to the depression I generally experience upon reading the morning news. If I can't read it, it can't depress me, right? (What you don't know can't hurt you). Of course, I can still be depressed by my inability to read, but of course that's a different subject, and one, on the plus side, that doesn't give me a headache. But these letters that refuse to stand still, that refuse to focus--now that gives me a headache. Instantly. It is also giving me a headache to read what I write on this screen, but I trust that will not be the case for the my followers as well.

I trust also that, if the past is any indication, my vision will improve somewhat bye-and-bye and thus provide me once again with the opportunity to be depressed by the news--although I can't think what I will do if the news becomes non-depressing. But I guess that's not likely to happen anytime soon. 

It has become difficult as well to read print in books. Needs just the right sort of light--not bright, oddly enough, but rather dim. Thankfully, I am able to read without problem on my iPad, because of course one can make the print as large as he pleases and can also vary the print and background color. One is able, in other words, to tweak the media toward focus rather than one's own eyes. 

Reading is chief among the simple joys in my life--always has been, and therefore, when taken away, leaves a yawning cavity in the landscape of my pleasure. It is also, therefore, fortuitous in this case that I have not found a good book to read since finishing Yu Hua's Brothers. I have tried a couple (The God of Small Things and The Golden Compass) that proved not worth focusing on anyway. 

I suppose I could convert altogether to the iPad, but there are two problems with that: 1) that I actually prefer to read in the Indonesian language and 2) that I actually prefer the tactile and sensory experience of books written on paper. The electronic media makes the material seem distant and aloof.  

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