WEBVTT

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And I will close
with a poem called

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"Monet Refuses the Operation."

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Monet was discovered to have
cataracts on both eyes in 1912.

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And he was urged to
have surgery for those.

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And he refused.

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He eventually did,
but not until 1922.

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So there were those
10 years in between.

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And who knows how many
years before 1912 when

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already his vision had
been very greatly impaired.

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And yet, he painted all those
marvelous, marvelous paintings.

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All the great paintings
are the late ones.

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And I was somehow
trying to give him

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a rationale for refusing the
operation which I'm sure is not

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historically accurate at all.

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"Doctor, you say there are
no halos around the street

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lights in Paris, and what I
see is an aberration caused

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by old age and affliction.

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I tell you, it has
taken me all my life

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to arrive at the
vision of gas lamps

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as angels, to soften and blur
and finally banish the edges.

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You regret I don't see.

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To learn that the line I call
the horizon does not exist.

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And sky and water so long apart
are the same state of being.

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54 years before I could
see Rouen Cathedral

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is built of parallel
shafts of sun.

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And now you want to restore my
youthful errors, fixed notions

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of top and bottom, the illusion
of three dimensional space,

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wisteria separate from
the bridge it covers.

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What can I say to convince you?

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The houses of parliament
dissolve night

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after night to become the
fluid dream of the Thames.

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I will not return to
a universe of objects

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that don't know each other.

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As if islands were
not the lost children

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of one great continent.

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The world is flux,
and light becomes

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what it touches, becomes
water, lilies on water,

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above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve

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and yellow and white
and cerulean lamps.

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Small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another

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that it would take long
streaming hair inside my brush

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to catch it.

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To paint the speed of light!

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Our weighted shapes, these
verticals burn to mix with air

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and change our bones,
skin, close to gases.

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Doctor, if only you could
see how heaven pulls Earth

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into its arms and how
infinitely the heart

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expands to claim this world
blue vapor without end."

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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