My eyes don't work, at least not fully, because they are blocked by disease. The scene around me appears through a kind of curtain, a haze.

My years with failing vision have prompted me to learn about the nature of the eye and the incredible gift of sight, which I had always taken for granted until it began to slip away.

A beach is not only a sweep of sand, but shells of sea creatures, the sea glass, the seaweed, the incongruous objects washed up by the ocean.

Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism.

The new history is really ancient history newly discovered. Journalists are taking crash courses in the blood-drenched background of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, North Ossetians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

It is part of the fundamental impulse in all living things to reach for light, part of the indomitable will to see.