And I will close with a poem called
"Monet Refuses the Operation."
Monet was discovered to have cataracts on both eyes in 1912.
And he was urged to have surgery for those.
And he refused.
He eventually did, but not until 1922.
So there were those 10 years in between.
And who knows how many years before 1912 when
already his vision had been very greatly impaired.
And yet, he painted all those marvelous, marvelous paintings.
All the great paintings are the late ones.
And I was somehow trying to give him
a rationale for refusing the operation which I'm sure is not
historically accurate at all.
"Doctor, you say there are no halos around the street
lights in Paris, and what I see is an aberration caused
by old age and affliction.
I tell you, it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps
as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges.
You regret I don't see.
To learn that the line I call the horizon does not exist.
And sky and water so long apart are the same state of being.
54 years before I could see Rouen Cathedral
is built of parallel shafts of sun.
And now you want to restore my youthful errors, fixed notions
of top and bottom, the illusion of three dimensional space,
wisteria separate from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you?
The houses of parliament dissolve night
after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames.
I will not return to a universe of objects
that don't know each other.
As if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.
The world is flux, and light becomes
what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve
and yellow and white and cerulean lamps.
Small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another
that it would take long streaming hair inside my brush
to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, close to gases.
Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls Earth
into its arms and how infinitely the heart
expands to claim this world blue vapor without end."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]