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

In the end, I found that the separation between the blind and the sighted worlds is largely superficial, constructed by stigma and misunderstanding rather than any inherent difference.

The world is most easily apprehended when one conceives of it in binaries—you either have a heap of quinoa or you don’t; it’s day until it’s night; it’s the beginning until it’s the end. But Beckett’s play sits with the pain and ambiguity of the in-between, a world in which the sun has set but it’s not night, where the sky is not simply gray but “l

“Then I started practicing half-smiling,” she said, “exactly as described by Thích Nhất Hạnh,” a Buddhist monk whose teachings she’d studied. The practice itself is very simple, as Mirra explains on her website. “The half-smile is slight, just enough, barely apparent.” Wearing a half smile, she told her interviewer, means “meeting absolutely everyt

somnambulists,

blindness doesn’t feel at all like the death of the sighted person that Father Carroll insisted it was. Rather, it feels like a cultivation of what the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki called “beginner’s mind.” I may be a middle-aged man with a master’s degree, but I’m still going to have to take a deep breath in, let it out, and try one more time to fin

Getting lost is not always comfortable, or pleasant, but it is an organic and fundamental part of the human experience. The more one is able to accept it, rather than fight it, the more skillful one becomes in one’s travels.

In Colorado, he learned to use cardinal directions, and can now often figure out which way he’s facing from the feeling of the sun on his face. But, he added, “it’s not like once you leave CCB, you’ll never get lost again.” This is useful practical advice for any blind traveler, but also points to a larger idea that blindness can offer anyone: the

The single most important skill for blind travel, Ahmed later told me, is that “you have to be willing to get lost, and be confident in your ability to figure it out.” In the early days of his blindness, he once took three hours to traverse a route that would have taken him five minutes with a sighted guide.

Carroll’s philosophy met its sharpest critic in Kenneth Jernigan, the second long-term president of the NFB, who rejected Carroll’s Freudian sense of blindness as castration and death in favor of the civil-rights-oriented view of it as merely a characteristic, limiting in the way that all characteristics are limiting. A blind person can’t be sighte