Sight Unseen

Defiling L’Enfant: The French architect L’Enfant devised an imposing but simple plan for the city that would be the American capital, Washington, D.C. — a city I would by good luck call home for nearly a decade. The two major seats of power, the White House and the immense Capitol building, would be connected by a wide boulevard, vaguely in sight of each other but not quite, like an intended flirtation. Memorials honoring Jefferson and Lincoln would sit slightly to the side, closer to the Potomac River. These four structures would all be neoclassical in nature, with domes and columns aplenty. At the center of it all there would be a 555-foot obelisk honoring George Washington and acting as a towering fulcrum. The cemetery where the war dead were buried was set into verdant, low-lying hills across the river, in Arlington, Virginia, gracefully low-keyed. Now this president proposes to ruin this perfect symmetry by building a triumphal arch that would lord over the cemetery and approach the Capitol dome in height. It would be his Parisian Arc de Triomphe. The idea comes as no surprise since his overweening vanity has already seen him add his name to the Kennedy Center, a squalid move thankfully undone by a local judge’s stern order. Yet the fact remains that, like a French poodle, this president must relieve himself wherever possible and thus mark his territory. If brought to fruition, the arch idea would mangle L’Enfant’s treasured blueprint. Many were the times when, by night, I would sit on the steps of the Capitol building, the Jefferson Memorial, or the Lincoln Memorial, before 9/11 made such youthful excursions impossible. Still, those lovely days in my lovely Washington remain etched powerfully onto my sense of American-ness. I can be singularly glad that my blindness will prevent me from seeing this gross real-estate developer’s imprint —and it is likely to be only one of many — on my beloved Washington.

Imprisoned lions: For decades, I have lived only blocks from the Rome Zoo, here euphemistically referred to as the Bioparco. I strolled its grounds a few times when I could still see, usually in the company of visitors who wanted to take a peek at the animals. But those days are long gone and now the zoo’s existence comes to mind at hourly intervals when a booming recorded female voice announces in both Italian and English that it is forbidden to feed the animals. But after the zoo closes in early evening, the tone changes. This is when I hear the roar of Bengal tigers, Serengeti lions, Siberian bears, and Indian elephants, a raw but sincere music I once found quaint. What could these caged animals be thinking, week after week, year after year? Only now, as a blind man, have I begun to understand. Their sounds are not casual. Each night they tell the world that they are locked in, imprisoned, deprived as I am deprived of a vital aspect of life, their autonomy, to roam and see the world outside their furnished prison. Like me, they desperately want something back. Like me, they will never attain it, so that every day by twilight they express their mournful regret just as, next-door to them, I more quietly mull over my own shut-in sadness.

Mr. Pete: These are strange days for the men and women of NATO, their eyes trained east toward Russia while also aware they’ve essentially been orphaned by Uncle Sam, their longtime benefactor. They are like the Yankees come to play a game they know but suddenly confronted with a lack of bats, balls, bases, and, worst of all, umpires. Where then to turn for everything from scarce jet fuel to combat advice, since even the European Union emits confusing signals? NATO’s surreal situation reminds me of a neighbor of ours, Mr. Pete, who in 1960 had a giant hole dug in his backyard into which a submarine was lowered, or so we boys thought — I was seven. But it was in fact a fallout shelter with cots, canned food, and a water cooler. We were allowed to play in the sub and even got sugar cookie treats from Mrs. Pete. In exchange we had to listen to him tell us about the “Russkies” and that in the end there would be no alliances and we’d have to fend for ourselves. All his bluster took on urgency two years later when Moscow delivered nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba. Cold War life going forward borrowed pages from the thick 1986 Tom Clancy novel, Red Storm Rising, in which Islamic extremists seize a vital Russian pipeline, thus forcing the Soviet Union to invade oil-rich Persian Gulf countries and triggering a massive conventional war in Europe. Though a very smart military writer with a superb mind for fiction, not even the likes of Clancy, were he still alive, could imagine Uncle Sam turning away from Europe. But he has, leaving NATO unsettled and, at times, directionless.

Subtraction: “The Earth is hungry to subtract” was the opening line of a poem I wrote in the mid-1990s after a series of earthquakes in the Americas, Anatolia, and Eurasia. The poem’s speculation involved the opening of fissures that would come to swallow up the whole of humanity as an aging Earth grown tired of the burden of its surface dwellers. But the subtraction I failed to take into consideration is molecular, viral, the sickness not below but on the surface, between human beings. For fifty years now, new viral strains, most carried by birds, bats, rodents, and simians, have begun contaminating humanity’s vulnerable inner fluids. Imagine, please, a coronavirus-like epidemic of Ebola, whose latest strain is menacing several African nations. The result might be more like what was imagined in the postapocalyptic film “28 Days Later.” At a more existential level, consider as well that Earth is aging and by all accounts has already lived about half its projected lifespan, 5 billion years, a lifetime that will ultimately come to a quietly cold end after the sun becomes a white dwarf. Unless the inhabitants of Earth find and colonize a new home, they will vanish. In a time when many debate whether climate change is real — few choosing to study the fate of dinosaurs or to meditate on ancient ice ages — the reality that the planet itself is entirely mortal dawns only on astronomers. And yet the real tick-tock is not a social media platform, but the sound of actual time passing, in the end bringing my poem’s prophecy of subtraction to fruition.