The painting beckoned me from across the room. In a bright, high-ceilinged gallery of the Courtauld, a small museum in London known for its collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, I moved past van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear,” beyond Degas’s dancers and Seurat’s fisherman, straight to a small Monet titled “Vase of Flowers.” I stood before it and felt my breath slow. My husband walked over to me. I wanted him to understand. “This is the way I see now,” I said quietly.
It was my year of living blurrily. After the discovery of a small tumor behind one eye, I’d had surgery and radiation. My doctors told me I would probably survive. I would also gradually become blind in the affected eye — a small price, it seemed, to pay for my life. But the slow leaching of my sight played havoc with not just one eye, but both. My “good” eye seemed to be acting in sympathy with my affected one — possibly a result of a medical phenomenon known as “sympathetic ophthalmia” — and so the world softened, receded into a haze. Faces were unrecognizable until I got up close. Familiar streets became difficult, even frightening, to navigate.
It was in places and spaces I didn’t know well that I felt most unmoored. On this trip to London, I had been experiencing a near-constant state of dizziness. Disoriented, I steadied myself against walls, tested the depth of curbs before stepping off. A trip in the underground with its maze of tunnels and escalators felt topsy-turvy, as if it had sprung from an M.C. Escher lithograph. At one point, we ran to catch a train, and I stepped inside just as the doors slid closed, only to turn and look out the smudged windows at my husband’s stricken face, his palms flat against the other side of the glass. I couldn’t read the signs and didn’t know the stops. The doors slid back open and my husband joined me, but for that second, it felt to me as if I could become lost in the world.
But here was “Vase of Flowers.” An extravagant explosion of mallows in a mossy ceramic vessel, it was a painting Monet had begun in the 1880s, then set aside and finally completed around 1920, six years before his death. The label suggested that the viewpoint creates “a strange feeling, as if the table and flowers are tilting forward and the forms dissolving.”
But for me, the feeling wasn’t strange at all. I saw the whole world now as an Impressionist painting. It was a comfort to know that at least in this moment, standing in front of “Vase of Flowers,” I was not alone. I was seeing it as any museum-goer would.
Monet suffered from cataracts, but had resisted surgery for years, the subject of a poem called “Monet Refuses the Operation” by Lisel Mueller that had assumed great meaning for me as my own vision deteriorated. In Mueller’s poem, Monet chides his doctor for assuming he’d prefer to see clearly, extolling the virtues and beauty of blurred sight. “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.”
When Monet returned to his long-discarded “Vase of Flowers,” he would have been at the nadir of his vision, the middle of his cataract period. (He finally relented and had the surgery in 1923, just three years before he died.) What allowed him to finish the painting? What softness? What self-forgiveness? What awareness of the beauty of forms dissolving? What willingness to be lost in the world?
Until that moment, I had longed for the crispness of sight I had taken for granted until it was gone. I had railed against being seen — or seeing — as a fragile person. I wanted to cross against the light, scamper up and down steps and leap onto trains. But now, surrounded by the work of Impressionists who dedicated themselves to capturing felt experience rather than reality, I sensed for the first time since my ordeal began that perhaps I would be OK — no, more than OK — with my altered sight. We learn, after all, that beauty is transient, that fading is only a matter of time. As I stood in that gallery before “Vase of Flowers,” the sharp and noisy world receded. I didn’t regret not seeing its edges.
Dani Shapiro is the host of the podcast “Family Secrets.” Her most recent novel is “Signal Fires.” Her other books include the memoir “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.”
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