The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

as Weygand writes, “the quintessential aristocrats of mendicancy” (a fancier-sounding and less racially loaded version, perhaps, of the contemporary image of the “welfare queen”).

This wasn’t the usual curiosity about what, exactly, I could see, but a more aggressive and invasive inquiry into how I felt about it all. I’ve encountered people like this before: arbitrarily tough questioners who approach casual dinner conversation as a chance to hone their journalistic interview skills.

Robert Hine, another fastidiously observant college professor who went blind in middle age, wrote that “to the blind, no loss can be as great as the dimming of loved faces. There is no substitute for the interchange of a smile.”

Orientation and mobility, or O&M, is the ultimate blindness skill, the ability to safely find one’s way through an environment that can feel hostile or bewildering to the untrained blind person.

To make do, he uses a pet theory he’s developed, about people’s visual attractiveness—I’ve heard variations of it from a few blind people. It’s a theory of the voice. His idea is that if someone is attractive, they’ll be positively reinforced from a young age by their peers and family, who will imbue them with the confidence that physical hotness b

I regard people who cry at paintings a bit like I regard people who cry at the symphony: I don’t doubt their emotion, but it seems wild to me that something so formal could create such feeling. I’ve always looked at art with a cooler eye, as something that was interesting to talk and think about, but that rarely evoked visceral emotions.

“Going blind has baked into it all the loneliness and isolation that we associate with blindness. A much more accurate way to describe it is becoming blind; blindness is much more an arrival than a departure.”

But blindfold, with its daredevil associations, would be out of place in the eye hospital. It would introduce that word, which must only be whispered—(blind)—carrying like an infectious disease vector the same unpleasantness my cane brought into the waiting room. In

semiotics,