Well, I am feeling tired. It has been a long, demanding day, one very likely to fatigue anyone’s senses. Just as I am not given vision, I am not much given to visions. This vision before me, coming so late in the party, is surely being offered to me not as something real, like a table or a trumpet or a galaxy, but as a benediction—that the promise Arthur and I made to each other long ago will be honored through future generations. I am not just one soul. Nor, would I suppose, are you.
Now, this is splendid—the sun itself has come to the party. The one in our own solar system, that is, to the evident excitement and joy of the Egyptian priests and also, I see, of other religious figures whose doctrines I cannot place. (I think I see Mani, although that makes me think specifically of light, and I cannot suppress a twinge of regret.) I am happy to see the sun at my party because, after all, without it we would have no heritage, and there would be no party. There would be none of us at all. So many guests are paying respects to the sun—I see even a dripping-wet Icarus, a good loser, among the knot of admirers—that I wonder whether all religions, including my own, do not somehow spring in spirit from the ancient human awe and respect for such a stupendous life-giving entity.
Standing behind the sun are all the stars and clouds of matter and forces of all sorts, giving our own petite sun an unaccustomed pride of place in honor of the occasion. The other guests passing near stare at them all in utter awe, becoming silent for a moment. Even the irritating Greek Chorus. The stars—are some of them in fact the souls of good, innocent men, women, and especially children, as well as animals, who have perished?
I think, too, of lines from the first love poem I ever wrote to Sue: “…And, my beloved, when our day is done, / Let us together hide amid a crowd of stars / Until the sun shines no more.”
What a gas! And how rewarding. I’ve been planning this party my entire life—a blow-out thank-you gala for the myriad people living and dead, things, forces, concepts, even creatures that have helped shape my life and led me to where I am at this very moment, sitting at my desk, dictating the end of these remembrances. That’s humbling enough. Why bother with Sandy Greenberg?
But another thought came to me just now, too. All these guests, even those I couldn’t have met or barely know of, have been planning this party just for me at the same time. That’s how the world really works, I’ve come to realize. We’re connected across time and space—sometimes minute, sometimes infinite—with the entire history of our species, the whole of this fragile and wonderful earth. The past sets the table for the present; the present must take care to set the table for the future. That single insight, so hard-won and to me so precious, might well serve as a coda.
Epilogue
To End Blindness Forever
I often wonder if John F. Kennedy, had he lived, would have been surprised when Neil Armstrong took that first step on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. Yes, the president had established the goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade in his May 25, 1961, address to a joint session of Congress. But did he really think that something so far beyond the boundaries of existing technology was achievable in less than ten years? Or was he simply trying to wake up a slow-moving space program before the Soviets topped it again?
Apollo 11 was much on my mind when Sue and I established our End Blindness by 2020 prize. By intent, the duration between our 2012 announcement of the prize and its presentation on December 14, 2020—2,978 days—is exactly the same as the space between Jack Kennedy’s address to Congress and Armstrong’s first “giant leap for mankind.”
I also had some of the same questions about my own motives when I announced our blindness quest. Was it really possible to end the ancient scourge of blindness within less than a decade? Or was our prize—initially $2 million, now grown to $3 million—more aspirational in nature, a signpost meant to pull together researchers worldwide to the common benefit of humanity? Now, eight years after we first made the prize public, I can say with confidence that both those are true and that the two goals have worked together in remarkable harmony.
Because blindness is many discrete diseases that arrive ultimately at the same place—the loss of sight—a more measured approach to fulfilling my tikkun olam might seem to have been in order. Perhaps an End Glaucoma prize, followed by an End Retinitis Pigmentosa campaign, and so on down the gamut of conditions that threaten vision. But I believed that the sheer audacity and sweeping nature of our goal—to end all blindness, forever—would demand the attention that a lesser goal might have failed to garner. And in that assumption I was quickly proved correct.
On December 12, 2012, only two months after Sue and I first announced the prize, Senators Chris Coons of Delaware and Rand Paul of Kentucky (himself an ophthalmologist) held a colloquy on the floor of the United States Senate to advocate the value of the End Blindness Prize.
As Senator Coons said: “Is this outrageous? Is this audacious? Maybe. But that is what experts said when President Kennedy
