Inner Visions

By Pico Iyer

Looking is not seeing," writes Henry Grunwald in Twilight (Knopf; 130 pages; $20), and often we really see something only when it is about to leave us. For Grunwald, the beginning of such a loss came seven years ago, when a routine examination revealed that he was legally blind in his left eye and was one of roughly 15 million Americans who suffer from macular degeneration, a gradual diminishing of eyesight (often caused by age) for which there is no cure.

A lifelong journalist, Grunwald--once editor-in-chief of Time Inc.--responded to the challenge with brisk attentiveness as much as apprehension. He read up on eye incisions that would make weaker men flinch, learned that James Thurber, after becoming blind, composed whole pages of prose in his head, and discovered that in ancient Egypt, medication for such problems might consist of urine, saliva, honey, the whites of eggs and "the milk of a woman who had borne only boys." Yet all the knowledge in the world could not erase the fact that the words and the paintings that had always been his lifeline were fading from his view.

Twilight is, at heart, a touching essay on vulnerability. It is the story of a man of action who has always been in command of his world accepting dependence and even folly: as he goes up to a maitre d' to shake his hand, Grunwald is told that he has just greeted a statue of a monkey. The eye, we learn early, is not just a camera but a "portal of light." In that respect, as in many others, this lucid, elegant book is a piercing reflection of (and on) the way that we see.

--By Pico Iyer