Frank Bruni

From New York Times columnist and bestselling author Frank Bruni comes a wise and moving memoir about aging, affliction, and optimism after partially losing his eyesight. One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience. Overnight, a rare stroke had cut off blood to one of his optic nerves, rendering him functionally blind in that eye—forever. And he soon learned from doctors that the same disorder could ravage his left eye, too. He could lose his sight altogether. In The Beauty of Dusk, Bruni hauntingly recounts his adjustment to this daunting reality, a medical and spiritual odyssey that involved not only reappraising his own priorities but also reaching out to, and gathering wisdom from, longtime friends and new acquaintances who had navigated their own traumas and afflictions. The result is a poignant, probing, and ultimately uplifting examination of the limits that all of us inevitably encounter, the lenses through which we choose to evaluate them and the tools we have for perseverance. Bruni’s world blurred in one sense but sharpened in another. Confronting unexpected hardship, he felt more blessed than ever before. There was vision lost. There was also vision found. He experienced his first real inklings that the day isn’t forever and that light inexorably fades. The Beauty of Dusk shows readers how he found meaning in that—and how to approach aging and mortality with joy.

On Vision Lost and Found

The Beauty of Dusk

Laura Mei

The challenge of life, present for most of it but more dominant in the second-half, is adjusting to loss; or more specifically, developing the judgement and grace not only to accept its inevitability, but also to recognize that it's not the only trajectory. To understand that there are many ways to meet and measure it and that there are consolations, including all that remains. Cherishing those leftovers, those holdovers, is the key to thriving and sometimes even to surviving. Why me?” There’s a better question, of course: “Why not me?” Why should any of us be spared struggle, when struggle is a condition more universal than comfort, than satiation, than peace, maybe than love? Should we even be calling or thinking of it as struggle, which connotes an exertion beyond the usual, a deviation from the norm? While we have minimal control over the events that befall us, we have the final say over how we regard and react to them.

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