Diary
6 January 2013
Yesterday, at the eye clinic at UC Berkeley, the clinician told me that I have a hereditary eye disease that will in time occlude my vision. Its effects can be mitigated, he said, and if gets too bad, it's possible to have new tissue transplanted. Seven years ago, after arranging for my first biopsy, I told a friend that I felt that I was standing in the vestibule of old age. Leaving the eye clinic, it was clear that I've moved further in, somewhere in the parlor now as opposed to those more dire rooms in the back.
In nine days, I'll be 66. People have started asking me if I'm still working. Most of them are older than me - younger people don't think to ask. Yes, I tell them, I enjoy my work. I like being part of a studio, working on projects that stretch us and remind me why teams matter. In my own work, like this diary, I do think about the possible audience, but the real motive is self-expression. I would place polemics in this category, also, since they grow out of a personal dislike of how things went or might go. Polemics are about redress.
Virtually everything I do on my own account moves much more slowly than the work I do for others. This is a luxury I grant myself, in the way that I.M. Pei decided, at age 70, only to do what interested him. There's a gray zone between work that's purely mine and work that's nominally personal, but actually taken on owing to ties to others. That work is more like work for others, but with less clarity, sometimes, about who does what and when it's due or finished. One of my resolutions for the New Year is to avoid it. Either it truly interests me or it doesn't.
Samuel Johnson's dictum about the desirability of writing for money is true for me up to a point. That point is repetition and boredom. "Why bother?" is a legitimate question, since prospective readers are equally aware, if they're paying any attention at all, that you've said it before.
Someone posted a "heed time's flight" warning a few days ago, attributing it to the Buddha. I questioned the attribution. "Well, if he didn't, he should have," came the reply, but this seems like a misunderstanding. The Buddha is the great master of the oxymoron. Transcience is how it is, and we unfold along with everything else. Our lives are finite, time is running out, but the context in which we live is vast and interconnected. Every moment has its value, however much we might disparage it.
As I've written elsewhere, I admire the maxim of E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood, "Work as if immortal," which I take as closely related to Fritz Perls' admonition, "Don't push the river." It could be laziness, of course, which is where the idea of practice comes in - practice in the Buddhist sense of regularly engaging with it. Having lived almost my entire life on someone else's schedule, practice doesn't come naturally to me. This is another New Year's resolution, to acquire more of that ability.
Yesterday, at the eye clinic at UC Berkeley, the clinician told me that I have a hereditary eye disease that will in time occlude my vision. Its effects can be mitigated, he said, and if gets too bad, it's possible to have new tissue transplanted. Seven years ago, after arranging for my first biopsy, I told a friend that I felt that I was standing in the vestibule of old age. Leaving the eye clinic, it was clear that I've moved further in, somewhere in the parlor now as opposed to those more dire rooms in the back.
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| Henri Cartier-Bresson later in life. |
Virtually everything I do on my own account moves much more slowly than the work I do for others. This is a luxury I grant myself, in the way that I.M. Pei decided, at age 70, only to do what interested him. There's a gray zone between work that's purely mine and work that's nominally personal, but actually taken on owing to ties to others. That work is more like work for others, but with less clarity, sometimes, about who does what and when it's due or finished. One of my resolutions for the New Year is to avoid it. Either it truly interests me or it doesn't.
Samuel Johnson's dictum about the desirability of writing for money is true for me up to a point. That point is repetition and boredom. "Why bother?" is a legitimate question, since prospective readers are equally aware, if they're paying any attention at all, that you've said it before.
Someone posted a "heed time's flight" warning a few days ago, attributing it to the Buddha. I questioned the attribution. "Well, if he didn't, he should have," came the reply, but this seems like a misunderstanding. The Buddha is the great master of the oxymoron. Transcience is how it is, and we unfold along with everything else. Our lives are finite, time is running out, but the context in which we live is vast and interconnected. Every moment has its value, however much we might disparage it.
As I've written elsewhere, I admire the maxim of E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood, "Work as if immortal," which I take as closely related to Fritz Perls' admonition, "Don't push the river." It could be laziness, of course, which is where the idea of practice comes in - practice in the Buddhist sense of regularly engaging with it. Having lived almost my entire life on someone else's schedule, practice doesn't come naturally to me. This is another New Year's resolution, to acquire more of that ability.
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