updated 4mo ago
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
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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
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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
from The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
Hope that I will still love the things I love, that I’ll still find them in the world. That I won’t crush them, or miss them every time—that sometimes I’ll accidentally touch one with my cane or foot, and it will be a blessing.
from The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
scotomas,
from The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
I’d been living with a kind of visual death sentence hanging over me, one that yesterday a young ophthalmological fellow had casually commuted.
from The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
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.”
from The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
If someone takes a new shape, in what way can we still speak of them as the same person they were before?
from The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
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.
from The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
Disability scholars are now pushing past the medical-social binary and toward—as the critic Jonathan Sterne helpfully puts it—“a conception of biology as having historical dimensions, and history as having biological dimensions.”
from The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland