Read: 2026-01-09
Recommend: 6/10
This book taught me that many IT tools, including the typewriter, were originally designed for blind users. It offered me a window into the daily life of a blind person and provided valuable lessons about letting-go as I followed the author’s gradual journey of becoming blind.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
There are a few common souvenirs that sighted tourists tend to take away from day trips to the country of the blind. The primary one is pity masquerading as empathy: “How difficult their lives are,” one might conclude, while more quietly affirming, Thank god for my eyesight. There’s also the satisfaction of a voyeuristic curiosity: How do they eat, or find their way home from the store, or really know how attractive their partner is? But a longer stay raises more philosophical questions. How does anyone know the world? Does vision deserve the privileged place it holds at the top of the hierarchy of the senses? How much of perception happens in the eyes, and how much takes place in the mind, regardless of which senses supply its stimulus?
Sight gives a target for the gaze to follow: with sight removed, the gaze remains—and by gaze I just mean an intelligent face pointed in the direction of the thing it’s regarding. You don’t need working eyes to have a gaze. Statues have gazes. But with sight removed, the gaze tilts and strays.
“No sighted person says, ‘Get a cane, dude,’ ” Will says now. “No one would ever think that, because sighted people view the cane as a sad thing, as tragedy.”
I told Will about my own anxieties—how I felt like an impostor, constantly vacillating between feeling too sighted to be blind, and too blind to be sighted.
The NFB philosophy straddles two seemingly opposing ideas: On the one hand, the organization argues that blindness is an incidental attribute that doesn’t affect one’s ability to accomplish nearly anything a sighted person can. On the other hand, the NFB demands accommodations and special benefits for blind people. These two ideas are difficult to hold at the same time: Are the blind equal to everyone else, or do they have special needs? But in practice, they needn’t be mutually exclusive; in fact, they’re the central tensions of the American way of life. Our laws are in constant tension between personal liberty (the decision to lift mask mandates in the midst of a pandemic, for example) and public welfare (protecting the immunocompromised from a deadly virus). The paradox of the American republic is that it at once enshrines our benefits while at the same time insisting on our liberties.
She delicately offered me the second visual field test as a choice, emphatically and entirely up to me, only if I wanted it, and she’d understand if I didn’t. But why wouldn’t I want to be legally blind? Some patients resist it, she said. They don’t feel blind, don’t want to be blind, and don’t want the word pinned to them. Many of them still drive (though they shouldn’t), or still have careers in fields that require vision. They don’t want to be blinded by someone else’s definition. I glanced at my cane, leaning faithfully in the corner. Becoming legally blind was just the sort of justification I’d been waiting for. With legal blindness, I’d own my blindness better.
Still, if the novel is a forest, it was as though I’d driven through it at 45 miles per hour, as opposed to walking—or lightly jogging—through the novel’s wooded terrain.
Information technology frequently has its roots in blindness. The world’s first typewriters, it turns out, were designed for the blind. In 1808, the Italian inventor Pellegrino Turri built the first working typewriter for his blind friend, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano. The American inventor Charles Thurber filed one of the first US patents for a typewriter in 1843, noting that his invention is specially intended for the use of the blind, who, by touching the keys on which raised letters are made and which they can discriminate by the sense of touch, will be enabled to commit their thoughts to paper. In 1993, nearly fifteen years before the first Amazon Kindle was released, blind technologists developed a digital reading format that eventually became EPUB, the current industry standard for all eBooks.
But all technology is about extending human capability.
It’s the gap between what a disabled and a nondisabled person are expected to accomplish without technology that makes disabled people seem like they don’t have independence. If you need a cane or a guide dog to safely cross the street, you’re disabled; if you need glasses and a pair of shoes to get there, you’re fine. But the relationship with the tools is the same.
Asch argued that the screening process sent a message to disabled people that their lives were inherently less valuable than nondisabled lives. She pointed out that most people would agree that it’s unethical to abort a fetus once a mother learned it was female, for instance, because of the message it sent that women’s lives are less worthy or desirable than men’s. But few had qualms about the practice of screening for nonlethal disabilities like Down syndrome. Genetic counselors and obstetricians frequently discussed these screenings in terms of the “risk” of acquiring “devastating defects,” in many cases actively encouraging or assuming mothers will decide to abort if the fetus is found to have the extra chromosome that causes the disability.
what the blind person needs most is not travel training but therapy. He will be taught to accept his limitations as insurmountable and his difference from others as unbridgeable. He will be encouraged to adjust to his painful station as a second-class citizen and discouraged from any thought of breaking and entering the first-class compartment. Moreover, all of this will be done in the name of teaching him “independence” and a “realistic” approach to his blindness.
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.”
the experience of being lost, like the experience of loss itself, need not be an occasion for pity and tragedy, panic and disaster. Like Josh Miele’s “graceful cascade of failure,” missteps can be fruitful. 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.
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 everything and everybody, always, with equanimity and friendliness.”
“When everything works, my blindness is just a fact of life, not an insurmountable obstacle blocking my path,” Georgina Kleege has written. “I work around it. I ignore it. On a lot of days, it matters less than the weather.” The writer Elizabeth Sammons told me that blindness is hardly the “main character” in her life.
There’s a powerful medical or even commonsensical impulse to keep fighting, to hang on to my vision, to preserve it (as another blind mentor put it to me) “down to the last photon.” But that no longer feels like a productive fight (if it ever did). It’s a losing battle, and one that sets me up against myself. These days, I feel ready to follow John Lee Clark’s path, to stop using my eyes for the basic visual functions I’m straining so much to hang on to—scanning the ground, reading large print, trying to find the spatula with my eyes instead of with my hands—and just let go.
I began this book with the idea that I existed with one foot in the sighted world, and the other in the blind one, and that I’d immerse myself in blindness, exploring all the radical, frustrating, innovative, weird, and wonderful things going on in this foreign land, to understand where I was headed.