Last December when I wrote the essay “Sing No Sad Songs for This Old Geezer,” it was intended primarily to tell my friends about the onset of blindness. Your responses have been overwhelmingly generous and I am deeply touched. I am not that good and not that courageous. The situation now is very much like it was in the melancholy days of World War II during the North African and Italian campaigns. At that time, it was my intention to do my duty, and to get from one day to the next without being killed. That is not necessarily courage; it is a matter of survival.
Your generous responses have led me to produce another few essays. The first two, dated before October 31, when the lights were turned out, were written by hand. On several occasions, I found that the right-hand margin of the paper did not stop my pen from writing. It just went on to the desk. Clearly, at that point I was becoming blind. The later essays, dated in the current year, were dictated rather than written. This is a difficult form for me to master, as I have always written essays in long hand until this time. Dictating without notes is a difficult exercise, but it is slowly being mastered. In the old days, there were essays that wrote themselves. In the new days of dictating, essays don’t write themselves anymore. About the closest I could come to having an essay write itself is the one called “…He Kept It For Hisself.” I hope you enjoy reading the essays.
Speaking of the onset of blindness, my old friend Howard Davis posed a question to me that required very little in terms of preparing an answer. Howard, as you may know, is the poet laureate of Defiance, Missouri, a job that pays something in excess of two million dollars or dinars a year. Howard asked me what was the last thing I saw before they turned the lights out. I am sure Howard envisioned a bed of daffodils or roses growing on a trellis or some romantic thing that would enhance his poetry. In point of fact, however, as much as it may disappoint Colonel Davis, the last thing I saw before the lights went out was the precious commode in the pre-op room in the Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. I don’t know how Howard will make a poem out of that situation, but that is not mine to question. It is up to Professor Davis whom I know will make an epic poem which may be an ode to a commode.
I hope you enjoy reading the essays. The newer ones, written by dictating, require a lot of polish. They are not as well written as those written earlier in long hand. But be that as it may, this is the current state of affairs.
Again, I thank you for your very generous comments with respect to “Sing No Sad Songs For This Old Geezer.” As I said earlier, I just am not that good.
E. E. CARR
March 5, 2006
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Below, I’ve linked my best guesses for the essays that he’s referring to. I’m pretty sure about the first two, but the second two come AFTER this note is dated, so I don’t know what the deal is with that. They’re all about blindness, though.
https://ezrasessays.com/?p=2227 A BUCKET OF WARM SPIT 10/10/05
https://ezrasessays.com/?p=2239 REFLECTIONS AS LIVES DRAW TO A CLOSE 10/23/05
https://ezrasessays.com/?p=1611 “WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE: ME OR YOUR LYING EYES?” 3/13/06
https://ezrasessays.com/?p=1617 IT’S ONLY THE FIRST INNING 6/23/06