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    Because it is locked away inside the skull, the brain is hard to study. Looking at it requires finicky machines which use magnetism or electricity or both to bypass the bone. There is just one tendril of brain tissue that can be seen from outside the body without any mucking about of this sort. That is the retina. Look into someone’s eyes and you are, in some small way, looking at their brain.

    This being so, a group of researchers decided to study the structure of the eye for signs of cognitive decline. Changes in the brain, they reasoned, might lead to changes in the nervous tissue connected to it. They focused on a part of the eye called the retinal nerve-fibre layer (RNFL). This is the lowest layer of the retina and serves to link the light-sensitive tissue above to the synapses which lead to the brain. The team’s results show that people with a thin RNFL are more likely to fail cognitive tests than those with a thick one. They are also more likely to suffer cognitive decline as they age.

(www.economist.com, 30.06.2018. Adaptado.)

Stephen King’s First Book Is 50 Years Old, and Still Horrifyingly Relevant

    Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon
an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s
career. It has sold millions, made millions,
inspired four films and passed from generation
[5] to generation. It was, and continues to be, a
phenomenon.
    “Carrie” was King’s first published
novel. Failing to convince himself, King
scrunched up the few pages he’d written and
[10] tossed them into the garbage. But his wife,
Tabitha — a dauntless soul, and evidently of a
curious temperament — fished them out,
uncrinkled them, read them, and famously
convinced King to continue the story. She

[15] wanted to know how it would come out, and
such desires on the part of readers are perhaps
the best motivation a writer can have.
    King proceeded. The novel grew into
a book with many voices. First, of course, there
[20] is Carrie herself: Picked on by her religious
fanatic of a mother, by her fellow high school
students and by the entire town of
Chamberlain, Maine, she is clumsy, yearning,
pimply, ignorant and, by the end, vengefully
[25] telekinetic. But we also hear from the next-

door neighbor who witnessed a violent display
of the toddler Carrie’s telekinetic
manifestations; from various journalistic
pieces, in Esquire and in local papers, about
[30] Carrie’s unusual powers and the destruction of
the town by fire and flood; from Ogilvie’s
Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena and from an
article in a science yearbook (“Telekinesis:
Analysis and Aftermath”); from Susan Snell, the
[35] only one of Carrie’s female classmates to
attempt to atone for the wrongs they did to
her; and from the academic paper “The Shadow
Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific
Conclusions Derived From the Case of Carietta
[40] White.”
    Then there are the inner voices of
various other characters, as overheard by
Carrie, who toward the end of her life becomes
telepathic and can listen in on the silent
[45] thoughts of others, as well as broadcasting her
inner life to them. Together, the many voices
tell the horrifying tale.
    What is it about “Carrie” that has
intrigued me? It’s one of those books that
[50] manage to dip into the collective unconscious
of their own age and society.
    Female figures with quas-

isupernatural powers seem to pop up in
literature at times when the struggle for
[55] women’s rights comes to the fore. H. Rider
Haggard’s “She” appeared toward the end of
the 19th century, when pressure for more
equality was building; its electrically gifted
heroine can kill with a pointed finger and a
[60] thought, and much verbiage is expended on
male anxieties about what might happen —
especially to men — should She-Who-Must-Be-

Obeyed train her sights on world domination.
    “Carrie” was written in the early
[65] 1970s, when the second-wave women’s
movement was at full throttle. There are a
couple of nods to this new form of feminism in
the novel, and King himself has said that he
was nervously aware of its implications for men
[70] of his generation. The male villain of “Carrie,”
Billy Nolan, is a throwback to the swaggering
hair-oiled tough-male posturing of the 1950s,

which is seen as already outmoded, though still
dangerous.
[75]     “Carrie White” is an interesting
combination. “Carrie,” as King takes pains to
point out, is not a nickname for Carol or
Carolina. Carrie’s given name is “Carietta,” an
unusual variant of “Caretta,” itself derived from
[80] “caritas,” or “charity” — loving and forgiving
kindness, the most important virtue in the
Christian triad of faith, hope and charity. This
kind of charity is noteworthily lacking in most
of the townspeople of Chamberlain. (Yes, there
[85] is a real Chamberlain, Maine, and I wonder how
its inhabitants felt when they discovered in
1974 that they’d be obliterated in 1979, the
year in which “Carrie” is set.)
    Most particularly, charitable loving
[90] kindness is entirely absent from Carrie’s
mother, nominally a devoted Christian, who
knows about Carrie’s superpowers, believes
she has inherited them from an eldritch, sugar-

bowl-levitating grandmother, and ascribes
[95] them to demonic energies and witchcraft, thus
viewing it as her pious duty to murder her own
child. Carrie herself wavers between love and
forgiveness and hate and revenge, but it’s the
hatred of the town that channels itself through
[100] her, tips her over the edge and transforms her
into an angel of destruction.
    As for “White,” you might be inclined
to think “white hat, black hat,” as in westerns,
or “white” as in innocent, white-clothed
[105] sacrificial lamb, and yes, Carrie is an innocent
— but also please consider “white trash.” The
white underclass has existed in America from
the beginning, and white trashers going back
generations are thick on the ground in Maine,
[110] Stephen King’s home territory — a territory he
has mined extensively over the course of his
career.
     He based the situation of Carrie on
two girls from that underclass whom he knew
[115] at school, both of them marked by poverty and
decaying clothing, both of them taunted and
despised and destroyed by their fellow
students. Everyone in the town was an
underdog in the carefully calibrated class
[120] structure of America — not for them the fancy
private schools and university educations,
unless they got really, really lucky.
    King is a visceral writer, and a master
of granular detail. As Marianne Moore said, the
[125] literary ideal is “imaginary gardens with real
toads in them,” and boy, are there a lot of
toads in King’s work! He writes “horror,” the
most literary of forms, especially when it
comes to the supernatural, which must 

[130] perforce be inspired by already existing tales
and books.
    But underneath the “horror,” in King,
is always the real horror: the all-too-actual
poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that
[135] exists in America today. The ultimate horror,
for him as it was for Dickens, is human cruelty,
and especially cruelty to children. It is this that
distorts “charity,” the better side of our nature,
the side that prompts us to take care of others.

Adapted from: www.nytimes.com /2024/03/25