OK, and the last is this little essay called "On Seeing."
And I am moved to read this tonight
because, all day, as I'm sure many of you have been,
I've been very disheartened by this horrible news
of this beheaded journalist, Jim Foley, in Syria by ISIS.
And there are so many things that
are outside our range of vision in this world that go on
as we sit here comfortably, so this essay attempts
to make a very, very, very slight nod to that condition.
So I'm going to read it.
It's very short, and I will close with it.
"On Seeing."
I do need a little water, though.
"When I was a kid, I wandered through the woods in Coventry,
Connecticut, until I got lost.
I was with my sister, and we couldn't see eventually
where we'd come from.
Nor could we see or predict the hermit's hut
we stumbled on with its broken windows and torn mattress.
This last fact impressed me particularly,
the fact of the torn mattress, and I found myself
imagining the vermin that shared the bed with the hermit,
the tiny rat's tails that whipped around his eyelids
at night.
And I was also impressed with the fact of the hermit,
who, in fact, we couldn't see, though I imagined him
in vivid detail for my sister's edification--
his malevolent face, his snarled beard and hair,
the dagger shaking in his cruel, bony fingers
and pointing at our throats.
This would be one of the last walks
I would take with my sister, not because either of us
are incapacitated or dead but because eventually my sister
came to distrust me.
I was an enthusiast for the hermit hut
and things of that nature.
It excited me unreasonably to become lost in the woods,
to pit my childish wits against the unknown and terrifying
world, and it excited me even more to frighten my sister.
I couldn't see at the time the deep caves of estrangement
that were forming in my sister's heart,
and even when we found our way to the right path, the path
that would take us back to our grandmother's house,
even at that fortuitous turn of events,
I couldn't see that luck was not a given in any life.
Years later, a man is pointing out
the constellations in a western sky, and I can't see them.
I can't see the Big Dipper, the Milky Way, or Scorpio.
The man is very patiently indicating
how the scorpion's tail curves through the sky,
but all I see are many points of light
all over everywhere in the black night, none distinguishable
from the other by virtue of intensity or direction.
Still, to be kind, I lie.
I see, I say, though I can't see.
My mother always said I couldn't see the forest for the trees,
but I don't see this as generally true of me,
though it may have had some particular truth in the past,
a time I can no longer see.
I often don't see how a certain thing comes to pass.
For example, x may happen, then y.
But to me, there is no alphabetical progression.
It might just as well have been x, then l.
It might just as well have been e, then c.
I don't see why, between intimate acquaintances,
estrangement eventually surfaces as
if it had been there all along hiding and out of sight.
I know I play a part in this estrangement,
but I don't see what it is.
The things we see are always less interesting
than the things we can't see, but when we eventually
do see the latter, they, too, join
the ranks of the uninteresting.
One almost never sees regret galloping along
in the distance.
It is its nature, whereas the nature of love
is to appear and disappear like a magician's rabbit.
Sometimes when concocting a meal without my glasses on,
I can't see the salt pouring invisibly from carton to pot.
On the other hand, when I cook while wearing glasses,
they fog up so that I can't see the sauteing onions,
the steaming vegetables.
Today in the grocery store, I didn't see the man bearing
along behind me, nor apparently did
he see me when he rammed his cart into my heel,
causing it to bleed.
Nor did I see my own blood leaving a spotty, macabre trail
throughout the aisles, marking my route
from produce to laundry detergent.
Some gaze deep, deep into the blackest night
and see the lost future in stars that have ceased to exist.
Who could believe this?
War, murder, the torture of prisoners
all take place way past my line of vision offstage,
and so perhaps I do not believe any of it.
The invisible plots against us, the destiny
of a village, which at one moment is full
of busy, reasonably happy citizens,
a kid carrying a bag of groceries, a man on a bike,
a colony of dogs, a woman with dark eyes gazing dreamily
through her kitchen window at the precise moment the sky
bursts into flame.
We should have left breadcrumbs, I told my sister that day
in the woods, but we should have left blood."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]