The Fading Light

Martha Wiseman

Word Count 303

In my house are many books.

I can no longer read the books that line our shelves. Not those patiently waiting, not those well-thumbed and scribbled in. My vision is deteriorating. Failing. The print swims across the page, the individual letters indistinguishable, doubling or masquerading as other letters, the words they create incomprehensible. 

I tell the books, I can still love you, your material selves, your words so carefully encompassed, though I can make little sense of them. I can still say, You are welcome in this place.

 My husband and I have both lived for, with, and in books for most of our lives, lives separate at first, now together.

We have a room housing most of our books. We call it the library, as if we lived in a British country house or a rich person’s stately mansion. Other books, often shoved in higgledy-piggledy, live on other shelves near our desks. 

The books assure me that, yes, I have existed in a particular brief span of time. They attest that I have absorbed words, held them in my hand, held them in my mind, my thoughts eddying round them. 

Some I have read, some I’ve planned to read, some I’ve thought I might read one day but then haven’t been sure why I’d purchased them. 

Certain books I need to see on the shelf, no matter that I cannot read them. Their very presence is talismanic. 

Certain books I like to touch, to say, Oh, you are here, that’s good.

Certain books I nod to in greeting. The memory of them nods back.

In my house are many windows. Even the dulled silver of a winter sky can feel expansive. When the clouds break, the sunlight surges in. It falls on all the books I cannot read. It warms us all.

Martha grew up in both New York and North Carolina. She has been an acting student, a dancer and choreographer, and an editor. She retired in 2020 from her position teaching literature and writing in the English Department and running the writing center at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.

The Georgia Review has published four essays of hers, the latest in Fall 2019. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and White Eagle Coffee Store Press brought out a long story, Double Vision (2004), as a chapbook. Her “Dreams of Foreign Cities,” a prize-winner in Fish Publishing’s Short Memoir Contest, was published in Fish Anthology 2021, and essays are out or forthcoming from Ponder Review, Under the Sun, and The Bookends Review. She has also published an essay on Proust, book reviews, and translations from French, and she has collaborated on dance-theater pieces at the University of Michigan.