Year: 1994
Type: article
Abstract: VISIT, WE AGREE?fine visit, actually, weatherwise and other wise, everything considered?but as with all visits agreeable and disagree able its course has run.Time now to get our things together, draw down our stock of consumables, tidy up our borrowed lodgings, savor one last time the pleasures of the place, say good-bye to acquaintances we've made, and move along."The light,'" you want to know: "Have we ever seen such light?"We have not, we agree?none better, anyhow, especially in these dew-bedazzled early mornings and the tawny late afternoons, when sidelit trees and beachfront virtually incandesce, and the view from our rented balcony qualifies for a travel poster.That light is a photon orgy; that light fires the prospect before us as if from inside out.Mediterranean, that light is, in its blue-white brilliance, Caribbean in its raw tenderness, yet paradoxically desert-crisp, so sharp-focusing the whole surround that we blink against our will.That light thrills?andputs us poignantly in mind of others who in time past have savored the likes of it and are no more: the late John Cheever, say, in whose stories light is almost a character, or the nineteenth-century Luminist painters, or for that matter the sun-drunk Euripides of Alcestis: "O shining clear day, and white clouds wheeling in the clear of heaven!" "Such light."Major-league light.This over breakfast bagels and coffee on the balcony ?the end of these Wunderb?geln, freckled with sesameand poppyseed, as good as any we've tasted anywhere, fresh-baked in the little deli that we discovered early on in the village not far inshore from "our" beach.So let's polish off this last one, to use up the last of our cream cheese and the final dablet of rough-cut marmalade lifted from the breakfast place downstairs along with just enough packets of coffee sweetener?rawbrown sugar for me, low-cal substitute for you?to go with the ration of House Blend coffee that we bought from that same jim-dandy deli on Day One, when we were stocking up for our stay.Can't take 'em with us."Have we measured out our life in coffee spoons?"We have, come to that, and canny guesstimators we turn out to have been.No more than a potsworth over, two at most, which we'll leave for 28University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access toThe Iowa Review www.
Source: The Iowa Review
Author: John Barth
Institution: University of Iowa
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1447094345