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

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

Only 16 percent of blind Americans have a college degree (less than half the national average), and more than a fifth don’t finish high school (more than double the rate of their sighted peers). Blind people are twice as likely to live in poverty. But the really astonishing statistic concerns blind labor. The US unemployment rate usually averages a

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.

For Hull, sex works the same way. Desire has been uncoupled from image, and the excitement has dimmed. He still feels physical pangs, same as with hunger, but “the trace of a perfume and the nuance of a voice are so insubstantial when compared with the full-bodied impact upon a sighted man of the appearance of an attractive woman.”

Milton’s response draws a sharp division between visual and mental impairment: I would, sir, prefer my blindness to yours; yours is a cloud spread over the mind, which darkens both the light of reason and of conscience; mine keeps from my view only the coloured surfaces of things, while it leaves me at liberty to contemplate the beauty and stabilit

My bid for legal blindness hung on the other metric, the visual field. This measures the narrowness of one’s tunnel vision. Normal vision is roughly 140 degrees; 20 degrees or less puts you into the domain of legal blindness.

The paradox of the American republic is that it at once enshrines our benefits while at the same time insisting on our liberties. This is also the paradox a blind person must confront.

until I die peacefully, still seated in the chair. My official cause of death: prolonged blindness. (I thought I’d invented this fictional malady—terminal blindness—until I read Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. In that play, the half-blind Clov blames the totally blind Hamm for the death of an unseen character, Mother Pegg, because Hamm refused to give he

If someone takes a new shape, in what way can we still speak of them as the same person they were before?