The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found
Written and Narrated by: Frank Bruni
Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
NOT what I was expecting; and that’s a GOOD thing!
I saw The Beauty of Dusk as the Daily Deal, considered it, and then thought: NAH, it’ll be some tripe about one man’s eeeeendless journey to gratitude and a newfound independence after a physical mishap occurs; namely a stroke leaving his vision in one eye, like, at nil. Suuuurely, he’d go on and on and on. Yeh yeh yeh; he’s been at the “New York Times” so p’raps he knows a bit about self-editing and brevity, but this audiobook is BOUND to be all platitudes, and self-absorption, and all whatnot.
But Big Sis got it, and we took this journey together -and-? It was grand!
See how well things go when you go into ANYthing with a mighty low bar indeed? Huzzah for minimal expectations, yay!
This does indeed start off with Bruni’s imbibing a bit much on the evening before and waking up with blurred vision. No problem, he thinks to himself, just a bit o’ goo in m’ eye, and so he showers. It doesn’t help. Welllll, those four glasses of wine probably have me dehydrated, and so he tries taking care of that. No go. Still all blurred. He starts getting a tad concerned, but at no point does he fly into fits of hysteria, until eeeendless tests indicate he’d had a stroke, and that vision? ‘Tain’t comin’ back…
Now here’s where I’d been s’posing his story would be aaaallll just his story. I mean, we get a bit on his partner and him kinda being on the outs, and sure enough, the relationship doesn’t make it. So CERtainly this is where Bruni starts moaning and whinging about going through one of the most trying times in his life all alone.
Ahhhh, but it’s not. Rather, the majority of The Beauty of Dusk is about how everything in Life comes down to (NO PUN INTENDED!!!) the way we see things. Bruni is a gatherer of stories, of little traumas, big traumas, the horror show that Aging can be, and he delivers just how the individuals undergoing these things have coped, managed, excelled. Of how they’ve decided to Live their Lives, rather than withdrawing into their Suffering. They’ve many reasons to complain; no one would fault them in the slightest.
But they don’t. A blind woman teaching the Electric Slide in line dancing? Well, she’d seen people with visual loss withdrawing into the shadows, and she decided: That’s NOT going to be Me. Further, this irascible woman refers to her state as Crippled. She likes the term even tho’ Bruni cringes. It cracks her up, and so Bruni sees her as a spunky and lively woman, one who will not be sidelined, one who can take a loaded word and imbue it with strength, with character, with a squid’s eye view on politically correct terminology; she will NOT be dictated to.
I gotta tell ya, stories like this are what this entire book comes to mean. I mean, I’m getting on in years, hit the peak ages and now cruising on the downslope, and have thus begun m’ gathering of audiobooks that’ll teach me how to age as FREAKIN’ gracefully as is possible (Tho’ I cop to having a Maman who’s modeled how to do it with Joy). These books are chockfull of how to live In Spite of the terrors of a disintegrating body that goes hand in hand with no longer being seen as having value within the confines of our society.
I mean, does it get any more depressing than that?!?
Look no further than to The Beauty of Dusk then for a compilation of stories and studies that bring a lightness not only to impairments, to aging, but to being Just Damned Old. WHAT a relief: A tried and true roadmap to navigating something we’ll all come to, if we’re blessed with such years.
I read one Nay-Saying review that called this all depressing. Accidents, Illness, Suicide, Pain Pain Pain. And the joy of this book is that Bruni addresses all these things, and he doesn’t minimize them in any way, he doesn’t sugarcoat them, he doesn’t bandy about words like “resilience”, he just makes them things that are survivable. Oh heck, MORE than survivable: They’re things that break you wide open for Life to come in.
Nah, no navel-gazing here. This is just not-quite-9-hours of Hope. There’s a sweetness to it that is in no way saccharine; there’s a light to it that, admittedly, might be way bright to some.
But ‘tain’t a positivity that’s toxic in any way. Rather, it’s just oodles of stories and people who have found ways to handle it all, to live through the storms, to not only survive the minor mishaps, the grander atrocities, but to come out, able to smile again.
As I sit here, pecking away at the keyboard, I’m looking at hands that have “seen better days”. At times? Yikes, how different they are, how vein-ridden and wrinkled. With healthy doses of what Bruni’s peddling, however?
Maybe they’re just hands that have done plenty of work, that have been able to express tenderness through many a year, with many a loved one…
With many a much-loved Furry Accomplice…
And what, I ask you, can be better than that?!
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