Sublime

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

Going blind and deaf. The passion and commitment that flow from having noble purposes can also make you blind and deaf. The more single-minded you become, the more difficult it will be to see and hear contrary data and to notice signals suggesting the need for amendment and midcourse correction.

You’re only going to see a few yards in front of you. Everything becomes beautifully spontaneous. Nothing is laid out in little rows anymore.

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.”

But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

Oedipus doesn’t feel all that useful to me, as far as images of blindness and sexuality go. For obvious reasons, I’d like to avoid conceiving of blindness as a symbolic castration, no matter how tightly desire may be lashed to the visual. I’m much more drawn to Tiresias, the blind prophet in Sophocles’s play, who foretold Oedipus’s demise. In Ovid’

THE BLIND SEE