Steve Reynolds was a communications officer with World Vision in Ethiopia when Bono and Ali visited in 1985. In World Vision’s spring 2012 magazine, he reflects on when God performed “eye surgery” on Bono to sharpen his vision.
I hadn’t thought about a possible influence from Marcel Proust for the lyric in “Stand Up Comedy” about the ego being “like a small child crossing an eight lane highway” until I read Reynolds’ opening line: “French novelist Marcel Proust once wrote, ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’”
Reynolds’ one page PDF article is here and the whole issue, which has a focus on the Horn of Africa, is here.