The Seeing Eye

By Gordon Hawkins

Cataract surgery is one of the great success stories of modern medical science. But, how, I wondered as the date for mine drew near, did a body of cascading water and a smudged eye come to share the same word?

The answer, of course, was to be found in the dictionary. In Latin, cataracta, it seems, has two meanings, one a 'waterfall' and the other a 'portcullis,' the grating which drops down to block the gateway to a castle, the perfect metaphor for an impediment to clear vision.

It was not the only thing I was wondering. When you are in your nineties, it is perhaps excusable that there should be a touch of apprehension as the date of your own operation draws near. My trepidation, however, was soon obscured by a sudden recollection. It was of a poem I once knew by heart: "Wine and Water" by G.K. Chesterton. I relished the lines:

The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the brink

As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink.

It was a simple case of word association but it buoyed me up. It became my mantra.

Then, in that frequent occurrence in which an unfamiliar word suddenly begins to crop up in unexpected places, I came upon a new, slim volume, written by the distinguished storyteller, dramatist and critic. John Berger. Its title? Cataract. Berger had himself just had the operation on his left eye. "Behind my right eye hangs a burlap cloth; behind my left eye there's a mirror." He writes. And "the colour which has come back to a degree I did not foresee is blue... It's as if the sky remembers its rendezvous with the other colours of the earth."

After the surgery these were precisely my sensations and, I suspect, those of most of us who have had the same operation. With the left eye alone everything looks 'worn' and with the right eye everything looks 'new.'

And Chesterton's poem stayed with me even when the blue sky gave way to one of our wintry days:

The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink, And Noah he cocked his eye and said, "It looks like rain, I think."