Essays by Sven Birkerts, Naomi Cohn, and Jennifer Gallo Gaites
MAY 10, 2026 - ISSUE 03
In this issue
Three authors grapple with identity and personal attachments:
Naomi Cohn considers the beauty of braille;
Sven Birkerts sorts through a lifetime of books and objects;
Jennifer Gallo Gaites finds larger meaning in small midlife pleasures.
Braille
by Naomi Cohn
“Braille,” if capitalized, refers to Louis Braille, the child of a nineteenth-century saddle-maker in Coupvray, France. Braille, who accidentally blinded himself with an awl. Braille, who invented a tactile system of reading and writing for the blind.
Lowercase “braille” refers to the system he created. Translating the experience of reading and writing braille into printed word stumps me. I have struggled to write this piece for months. I keep getting bogged down in providing information: Braille’s biography, when Braille invented braille, the intricate mechanics of reading, writing, and producing braille.
What I want to write is a love poem. What I felt about books was passion, desire, love. My love of books was a young love, a first love. Visual. Yes, touch mattered, stroking the typographic scar of each letter on a page. But all those beauties in the bookstore! Once I had chosen, I loved to gaze on the beloved.
Large print, small print, the print on cereal boxes, the fading print of cheap paperbacks, the glossy ink of coffee table books. Yesterday’s newspaper, microfiche, card catalogs, scribbled notes, hand-painted signs peeling in the sun, maps. A map, its fusion of image and text and symbol.
But now I am older and blinder, and I love braille. I love braille in the way of the old. Loving touch, lights on, lights off, eyes open, eyes closed. It does not matter. I’ve fallen hard. It’s taken years to begin to know the bumps and oddities. The lighter my touch over braille’s contours, the more I understand.
When I began learning braille as part of Adjustment to Blindness Training in 2010, people often said that more than half of our brain is allocated to processing visual input. Others said that learning braille uses brain space and neural connections in the visual cortex. New connections reach across, fingers of axon touching fingers of dendrite. Old love wipes out young.
Visual pathways once said eyes crinkling without a smile meant repressed laugh.
Thick line along seam of t-shirt meant inside out.
Thread loose on button meant find a needle.
Now I have re-wired. One combination of bumps says J. Another indicates a number sign. Feeling the two next to each other now means the clump of dots that read as J will now read as zero. After much practice, pathways take in clumps of bumps and know: CH and E and F, and recognize chef.
It’s too much to explain. You know how love is. The intimate knowing defies description. How do you talk about where joy happens?
Braille is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, those almost touching fingers of God and Adam. When my finger touches braille bumps, something moves in me.
The Voice of Things
by Sven Birkerts
My wife and I moved a short while back from our crowded and lair-like house outside Boston to an abruptly more open and airy place in Amherst. Over a month in, I’m still gaping at new space and different light. The move came after thirty years in the house that most of our lives had happened in, the house about which I said for close to thirty years to anyone who would listen, “You’re going to have to bury me out back by the hollowed-out apple tree trunk.” And I meant it.
How I (we) got from that primal allegiance to ordering boxes from Home Depot is a narrative I won’t try to unspool. Suffice it to say, the boxes arrived in bundles of ten, so many that we admitted we had over-bought, an admission we retracted few weeks later when we had to repeat the order.
I found that going through my accumulations became an ongoing encounter with everyone I’ve been on the way to whoever I am now.
Books were obviously the most powerful triggers, and I could fill many pages just itemizing my hours of vetting. There was no way I could just stack them by the handful into the boxes. The process for me was akin to updating an old address book, a kind of time-travel. The Alexandria Quartet (keep, maybe….), The Sportswriter (am I really going to read about Frank Bascombe again?), The Wings of the Dove (there may yet come a day….) and so on. If one were to follow that stream-of-consciousness until all the books were packed, the diary of my inner life — which is to say — my reading life, would be on open display.
Then there were all those things, objects saved through the years. The “keep or take” dilemma for those was usually fairly straightforward. The decisions were made along the lines of usefulness and sentiment. Much calling across the room. “What about this?” “Are you kidding? My sister gave me that — I want it!” Between the two of us most of the “stuff” got sorted and was either saved or set aside for the big Goodwill truck parked out behind the Stop & Shop.
But now I ask, for I still wonder, what about everything else? What about all the things in between? Things not necessarily useful but also not saturated with association. The Latvian ornament someone gave my parents who then passed it to me; the watches and glasses I will never wear again; that small piece of the Berlin Wall, alongside with a chip of granite taken from Joyce’s Martello tower in Dublin; a small, glazed ceramic head my daughter made; that silver flask my wife gave my father for his birthday….
Asked, I will claim a love of spareness. I privately invoke Tolstoy’s story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” and affirm the answer: six feet. So then what are all those boxes doing there, Mr. Kane? If I never opened those boxes again, just left them piled up there through the seasons, I would probably forget them entirely. So why not the dumpster?
This, I guess, brings the real question. Why, if not out of nostalgia or utility, does one keep something? Why can’t I toss that old wooden knife sharpener shaped like a rooster? My album of Paul Butterfield’s East-West, which will never revolve on a turntable again?
The answer is, I think, shockingly simple. I keep these things because I have gone through time with them. They have been in my field of vision for decades, many of them. The Butterfield album was there with me in room after room of my growing up. The objects I keep are not necessarily connected to special occasions and mark no anecdotally special moments. They belong to the special class of nouns: They were the things that were with me, part of my surroundings as year after year I moved through my ordinary day.
These familiar things, no matter how useless, hold the mark of our nearness to them. An object seen daily for thirty years is one I have gradually irradiated with my idle glances, or, vice versa, that has molecule by molecule imprinted itself on me, staked its mysterious claim. All these recognitions belong to the profound retrospective that is packing-up. They determine for me letting go and also preview what might yet happen. I have little doubt that they also stand in for larger and deeper assessments still to come.
Unglued
by Jennifer Gallo Gaites
Eyelashes have a natural growing and shedding cycle. I’m thinking about explaining this to the doctor, but I’m not sure she’ll understand. Not about the cycle, of course. Just the shedding.
I want to tell her I leave a trail of eyelashes wherever I go. Open parentheses across my bathroom vanity, in the crease of my book at night, on my husband’s shoulder.
She washes her hands and we chat for a few seconds — long enough for me to learn that since I’ve entered the windowless examining room the skies have opened. She just called her husband and asked him to cover their child’s sandbox to keep it from getting waterlogged.
She surveys my face. “Ooh, that looks painful,” she says.
My left eyelid has an infection and is three times its normal size. It’s also a reddish-purple hue that I might like as a shade of eyeshadow, but I don’t wear eyeshadow.
As we talk, I take off my glasses. She leans in with a penlight and asks questions: When did it start? Is it itchy? Is there discharge?
I guess that she is somewhere in her early thirties which I reflexively think is, like, ten years younger than me. But, since I’m almost fifty, there’s probably closer to a twenty-year distance between us. Not that it matters.
What I’m about to ask feels absurd. If she’s in her thirties, she’ll think she understands, but I’m not so sure.
She gently pulls at my upper lid with her thumb.
“Do you think this is from getting fake eyelashes?” I ask.
“It could be,” she says noncommittally and — I am grateful — nonjudgmentally. “Sometimes the glue can irritate the eye.”
I feel like I’ve been punished. Like some sort of perimenopausal Icarus, flying too close to the sun.
* * *
The first time I asked for eyelash extensions, I felt like I was asking to be dipped in glitter. I had no big fancy event coming up. I am not on a reality TV show. Simply, I’d been noticing the definition around my eyes had changed. A fading.
The lash technician asked me questions about what I wanted. I didn’t know how to answer, how to say I wanted my own lashes from ten years ago. Noticing her heavy lashes, I resisted the urge to answer, “Not like yours.”
When we were done, she handed me a mirror. She showed me how to brush them. The lashes were thicker than I’d hoped. A little unexpected. I loved them.
“I hope it’s not the glue,” I say to the doctor. “I love eyelash extensions. It’s one thing on my body I can control right now.”
She laughs and says, “Something you can control. I totally get that.”
She prescribes an ointment to treat the infection. What I didn’t understand when I was the doctor’s age is how many pieces of ourselves we lose by the time we get to menopause. The bits of ourselves that fall away. All the ways we come unglued.
In the exact tone and words I’d use if I were talking to one of my children, I tell myself I shouldn’t get fake lashes anymore. I scold myself for being vain.
But this isn’t about vanity. It’s about joy.
* * *
Within a week, one eye has cleared up, but the infection spreads to the other eye. This time, I call to make an appointment with my eye doctor.
In the years I’ve been seeing this optometrist, we’ve shared bits of ourselves. I know we’re the same age. I know when her son started driving. When her mother stopped driving. Where she gets her haircut. We’ve laughed at the life-changing magic of prescription sunglasses. I know, like me, she doesn’t wear contact lenses anymore. Our eyes get dry.
The receptionist tells me that the eye doctor is out on medical leave. They can put me in with a covering doctor. “Would that be okay?”
“Of course,” I say. But I want to know what’s happened, if the doctor is okay. If her family is okay. It’s none of my business, but I’m surprised by my worry for her — by my disappointment at not hearing her easy laugh when I tell her my predicament.
The covering optometrist is young and emotionless. She gives me a prescription for an oral antibiotic but warns, “It’ll take time to clear up.”
As if I’m going to confession, I tell her about getting fake lashes, tell her that I love them.
I don’t know why I felt embarrassed about wanting fake lashes. To admit that I missed parts of myself I’d taken for granted. To find joy in my own body in the midst of change.
* * *
“You don’t need fake lashes,” my husband insists. I appreciate this; he means it as a compliment. “It’s silly.”
I agree, mostly.
I concede because my right eye is still swollen. For now, I say that I’ll stop getting my eyelashes done. But I don’t think it’s silly — in the face of getting older and all that changes, in us and around us — to find delight in something that feels indulgent. To want to find small joys, knowing that they are fleeting, and attach them to ourselves one by one. To hold onto those joys for as long as we can, admiring them, tending and nurturing them. Wanting to let joy fall off our bodies, leaving a trail of tiny pleasures behind.
Credits
Naomi Cohn has lived many lives, among them, as a community organizer, encyclopedia copy editor, therapist, artist, and Minnesota-based writer. She is the author of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press, 2024), from which the above essay originates.
Sven Birkerts is the author of eleven books, most recently The Miro Worm and The Mysteries of Writing (Arrowsmith Press, 2024). He is editor emeritus of AGNI, and former director of Bennington Writing Seminars. The above essay originally appeared in the 09/13/21 issue of Brevity (brevitymag.com).
Jennifer Gallo Gaites is a writing instructor at Project Write Now, a nonprofit in New Jersey. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and Pangyrus. The above essay first ran in the March/April, 2025 issue of Literary Mama (literarymama.com).
Photos by Betsey Henkels