Coping with calamity: Former NYT columnist Frank Bruni on blindness and vision, at Morristown book fest keynote – Morristown Green
October 15th, 2022 1:44 amFrank Bruni has seen many people and places over the last quarter-century as a correspondent and columnist for the New York Times.
Because of a rare vision disorder, he now lives with the knowledge that soon he may not see anything.
Bruni, 57, writes about taming that anxiety, and about aging and the hard-earned wisdom it brings, in The Beauty of Dusk, On Vision Lost and Found. On Friday, he kicked off the ninth Morristown Festival of Books in a free-wheeling, often humorous conversation with MSNBC anchor Katy Tur.
If you focus on all the bad that can happen that will become your life, that fear, that paralysis. What have you accomplished? Bruni said during the hour-long keynote at the Mayo Performing Arts Center, where he also touched on politics, the pitfalls of social media, the process of writing, and the pressures of college admissions.
The festival and its junior spinoff, KidFest, continue all day Saturday, Oct. 8, 2022, with free talks in downtown churches and the library by 60 authors. Tickets are $60 for the closing session with best-selling author James Patterson (Blowback).
Bruni awakened one morning in late 2017 with blurry vision in his right eye. Doctors told him a rare stroke had cut off blood to an optic nerve, rendering that eye functionally blind. They warned of a 20 percent chance the same thing could happen in his left eye.
For months, he faced the dawn with anxiety: Would he wake up blind?
A pair of clinical trials were dead ends. One study involved a series of injections directly into his faulty eyeball. Clamped eyelids kept him from blinking.
So you feel like youre Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, Bruni recounted, to laughter from the large crowd.
The Beauty of Dusk offers examples of people persevering despite major disabilities a limb lost in wartime, early-onset Parkinsons disease, blindness. Many times we avoid asking individuals about their afflictions, out of politeness or concerns about making them uncomfortable. These are missed opportunities for insights, according to Bruni, who discovered that people were eager to share their stories for his book.
Gradually, he adopted a sunny view of his situation.
I think for a lot of us, there is a zone in which we can choose to be more positive or negative, Bruni said.
You can decide to be angry, and legitimately so. Where does that get you? You can decide to do a tally of all the things that are unavailable to youWhere does that get you? Or you can say, What do I have left?'
Driving at night has become problematic, and parallel parking is out. Reading can be a struggle. Yet Bruni knows things could be worse.
How lucky am I, or any of us who have vision disabilities, to be living at a moment in time when you can control the font size of just about everything?
Bruni said he even scammed the Times into sending him to a Greek island, the source of one of his trial drugs.
Bruni became a media professor at Duke University last year. He has covered the White House, the Persian Gulf War, and the AIDS crisis. Times assignments included Rome bureau chief, restaurant critic, and columnist; he also has appeared regularly on CNN and taught at Princeton. The Beauty of Dusk is his fifth book.
His most popular work, Where You Go Is Not Who Youll Be, took aim at college admissions.
I think weve done a hideous disservice to young people by changing their middle school and high school experiences into this terrifying period whereeverything they do is passed through the prism of how this will look to a bunch of strangers in Princeton, New Jersey, Bruni said.
Its really parents who have to change this, stop telling their kids that this school is better than that school because it rejects more people.
Fielding audience questions, Bruni and Tur who on Saturday will discuss her second book, Rough Draft agreed that writing is hard.
I kind of hate it, said Tur, 38, who anchors MSNBCs Katy Tur Reports. Her advice: Let the words cascade, then start pruning.
Although Bruni once banged out an Ivanka Trump column in 20 minutes, other pieces could take hours, he said. I dont have a process. Just a lot of hope and a keyboard.
When words dont come, he advised pausing. Take a run. Take a showerhave a cocktail.
Bruni and Tur said they dread man on the street interviews. They also admitted suffering from Imposter Syndrome, described by Tur as the fear that interview subjects will think youre an idiot.
Both were critical of social media. Blasted repeatedly by President Trump, Tur turned off her Twitter account before publishing her best-seller Unbelievable, My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History.
Its a liberating feeling to release yourself from that jail, she said. It can ruin you. In reality, Twitter is a very small portion of the population who have not-representative opinions about most issues.
It was supposed to be a means and a tool of connection, and its become an agent of division, Bruni added. People use social media to hunker down deeper and more consistently in their own micro-tribes.
Most importantly, a young listener wanted to know how Bruni, a University of North Carolina graduate, feels about teaching at archrival Duke. Bruni got booed for that new affiliation while delivering a commencement address at his alma mater.
When the Tar Heels play the Blue Devils in basketball, Im Switzerland, Bruni insisted.
I view it all with anthropological curiosity.
MORE ABOUT THE 2022 MORRISTOWN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS
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Coping with calamity: Former NYT columnist Frank Bruni on blindness and vision, at Morristown book fest keynote - Morristown Green