Blind

“ We have, then, the senses of hearing, touch and smell, each playing its part in the development of the blind child, and each playing it so well that the lack of eyesight is not keenly felt in early childhood. Not until it is old enough to understand the thoughtless remarks of well-meaning people, to catch the pitying tone, to feel the compassionate touch, does it realize that this lack of eyesight is to prove an almost insurmountable barrier to its future success. ”

“ With his remaining faculties keenly alert, with a courage and fortitude born of many trials, the blind adult is prepared to face life squarely, undaunted and unafraid, asking only to take his place on the firing line, to march shoulder to shoulder with his seeing brother, and to do a man's work in the world. ”

“ I am mentally deaf if, hearing a bell, I can't recall how it looks; and mentally blind if, seeing it, I can't recall its sound or its name. As a matter of fact, I should have to be not merely mentally blind, but stone-blind, if all my visual images were lost. ”

“ THE BLESSINGS OF THE BLIND To the Editor of The Idler.
Dear Sir: Those who are blessed, as the saying is, with two eyes and the gift of sight, are much given to expressing sympathy with, and sorrow for, the blind. It would be churlish to quarrel with so unselfish a sentiment, for it is, indeed, very good-natured of those who are busily engaged in seeing the sights of the world to spare the time and the thought which they give to the sightless. Yet I often wonder if the blind do not sometimes question, as I do, if a great deal of this sympathy is not wasted? ”

“ I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people's hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage. ”

“ In a surprisingly short time, the blind adult becomes accustomed to the new conditions, the various organs perform their new functions, and he finds life in sightless land to be, in many respects, very like life in that world of light and color, now only a memory. But a very living memory—enabling him to recall the faces of his friends, the glow of sunset, or the rosy light of dawn with the eye of the mind whose vision is keener, clearer than mere physical sight. ”

“ There is the connubial blindness, ma’am, which perhaps you may have observed in the course of your own experience, and which is a kind of wilful and self-bandaging blindness. There is the blindness of party, ma’am, and public men, which is the blindness of a mad bull in the midst of a regiment of soldiers clothed in red. There is the blind confidence of youth, which is the blindness of young kittens, whose eyes have not yet opened on the world; and there is that physical blindness, ma’am, of which I am, contrairy to my own desire, a most illustrious example. ”

“ I have often wondered what kind of dreams blind people—those who have been blind from birth, I mean—dream, what kind of scenes their vision pictures, how their friends, and those they love, look who people this world of sleeping fancy. I have never had the courage to ask those blind people whom I know, but this soldier to whom I talked, told me that every night when he goes to bed he prays that he may dream—because in his dreams he is not blind, in his dreams he can see, and he is once more happy. ”

“ A blind man walks without the gate,
Wild-staring as an owl by day,
Fumbling his flute betimes and late,
Along the way.
He pipeth, weary wretch and worn,
A roundel shrill and obsolete.
The spectre of a dog forlorn
Attends his feet.
For him the days go lustreless.
Invisible life with beat and roar
He heareth like a torrent press
Around, before. ”

“ Blindness wraps the outer world about with a dark veil, which likewise envelops the brain, entangling and impeding its processes; and yet by the aid of inherited conceptions and impressions gained from other sources, the brain creates in this darkness a world of its own, sad, gloomy, and sombre, but not devoid of a vague poetry peculiar to itself. ”

“ But the blind are quite agreeable and ornamental compared with the maimed, the diseased, the shrivelled, the distorted, who lie under walls and upon the staircases of public buildings, station themselves at street corners, ride about on donkeys, and everywhere disgust you with their nauseous presence, and pester you with their piteous whine. ”

“ Furthermore, his blindness, by quickening all his remaining faculties, enabled him to hear without effort everything going on around him.
The Lure within. The chatter in the brilliant drawing-rooms, the swish of silks, the trailing of velvets on silken carpets, the rustle of starch and frills on the parquet floor, the perfume used by the women, the 130smell of furs, candles, lamps and the warm air heavy with fragrant flowers, the murmur of distant fountains and music—everything touched the sensitive nervous organism. ”

“ For what can a blind man know of color, or a deaf one of sound? They have both reason to wonder; the deaf man at seeing the musicians, the blind man at feeling the different openings in the palace walls ”

“ Sometimes in the late evening one walks busily up and down the ward doing this and that, forgetting that there is anything beyond [Pg 46] the drawn blinds, engrossed in the patients, one's tasks—bed-making, washing, one errand and another—and then suddenly a blind will blow out and almost up to the ceiling, and through it you will catch a glimpse that makes you gasp, of a black night crossed with bladed searchlights, of a moon behind a crooked tree.
The lifting of the blind is a miracle; I do not believe in the wind. ”

“ Many a poor creature, blind from birth or infancy, was gifted with, or restored to excellent sight; the maimed were suddenly cured—the deaf made to hear—the dumb to speak—and the study baccagh, or cripple, bounded away, at the rate of six miles an hour, cursing the whole thing as a bad spec—a dead failure. ”

“ A blind man called attention to his dim eyes; a pale, scrofulous youth displayed the sores on his legs; a paralytic woman sought to join her woeful twisted hands: did the authorities wish to see them all perish, did they refuse them the last divine chance of life, condemned and abandoned as they were by the science of man? ”

“ Let any one among us, who walks in the sunlight, taking his eyes as matters of course, cover them up for a moment, and think what it would be to grope about in a perpetual darkness,—not that he may give himself a gratulatory hug at his freedom from his neighbour’s affliction, but that, feeling its magnitude he may pity it,—and he too would possibly turn and relieve the sorrows of the poor blind man, as the placard bade him do. ”

“ When the blind are operated on for the restoration of sight, it is suggestively remarked by an eminent author, that the same succouring hand which has opened to them the visible world, immediately shuts out the bright prospect again for a time, a bandage being passed over the eyes, lest in the first tenderness of their recovered sense, they should be fatally affected by the sudden transition from darkness to light. ”

“ Helen Keller, in answer to the question, What is it to be blind? said joyfully, ‘To be blind is to see the bright side of life.’ She is perfectly sincere in this, and feels that in blindness, uncomeliness and ugliness can never obtrude, while imagination is free to paint the most sublime pictures. Not a few blind people have said that they would prefer not to see, because with sight would come many disillusionments. ”

“ No person born blind can comprehend the nature of the impression that sight conveys. Red may be as "the sound of a trumpet," blue as the outer air, and green a something connected with the meadows and the delight of flowers and shade; but except to those who remember, the sense of sight is only a name for the incomprehensible.
Bessie did not remember, and therefore she did not know the special hardship of blindness and that sense of irreparable loss, of "wisdom at one entrance quite shut out," which is so heavy an affliction. ”

“ Transmitting quickly hundreds of impressions to his swift brain and wonderful imagination, they created for the blind man vividly the scenes in which he moved, and in which he delighted with greater keenness than the usual seeing person, and probably even more intensely than if he had seen them actually with his bodily eye. ”

“ I see the blind man's eyes strain for the light, as he fearfully tries to walk his old rounds, [97] until the unchanging blank that everywhere spreads before him stamps the reality of the dark upon his consciousness.
My temporary loss of smell proved to me, too, that the absence of a sense need not dull the mental faculties and does not distort one's view of the world, and so I reason that blindness and deafness need not pervert the inner order of the intellect. ”

“ As with the nation today, so with those interested in the welfare of the blind—we look to the children for the fulfillment of our highest ideals, and hope, in their advancement, to see our "dearest dreams come true." I am often called visionary, and I am proud to confess that I have a vision, a wonderful vision of the future of the blind. ”

“ But when the globe, growing larger and larger as it drew near the earth, became veiled by a heavy red mist and finally disappeared below the horizon line, the face of the blind man would soften and grow calm, and he would rise and go to his room. ”

“ Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!” ”

“ But, blindfolded as I was, I found that they are literally right, and that our sense of seeing is so much stronger that it blinds us to the less acute sensitiveness of the other organs. Partly by hearing, partly by that sixth sense of the blind, I knew that we passed through a thriving hamlet of people, not men alone, but women and children. ”

“ Let us find other and broader avenues of usefulness for these our civil blind heroes, who went into the dark with no blare of trumpets, no applause from cheering multitudes, and who wear no badge of honor on their breasts. ”

“ The blind, though unable to perceive the light of the sun, are, nevertheless, capable of experiencing its continual heat. The blind in heart, however, among the people of the Bayán—and to this God is My witness—are impotent, no matter how long the Sun may shine upon them, either to perceive the radiance of its glory, or to appreciate the warmth of its rays. ”

“ Fawcett, referring to the blind, said, ‘Nothing, he found, was so hard to bear as to hear people, when they spoke of the blind, assume a patronising tone towards them, as if they were suffering from something for which in some mysterious way they should feel thankful. ”

“ First, let us consider the subject from the point of view of one who has been blind from early infancy, whose fingers are his eyes, and whose mental vision enables him to see many things not revealed by physical sight. A blind man once said, when asked if he would not be glad to have his eyesight, "to improve the organs I have, would be as good as to give me that which is wanting in me." This sentence sums up the whole aim of blind education. ”

“ Her look of silent appeal showed me in which direction her wishes lay, but while I answered her glance by complete silence, I was conscious in some indistinct way that the business I had undertaken would be better furthered by his entrance.
The blind have often been said to possess a sixth sense in place of the one they have lost. ”

“ We observe however, that the blind have a more delicate and accurate touch than we, because, not having sight to guide them, they depend upon touch for the judgments we form with the aid of sight. Why then do we not train ourselves to walk, like them, in the dark, to recognize by the touch all bodies we can reach, to judge of objects around us, in short, to do by night and in the dark all they do in daytime without eyesight? ”

“ In May 1858 one of the earliest entries in her Common Place Book refers to this subject, and treats of the position of the blind in a world specially adapted for the sighted. The sensible, clear view, calm and dispassionate, is characteristic of one trained to look on all sides of a subject, and to recognise that which is just for all. ”

“ We have flattered ourselves by inventing proverbs of comparison in matter of blindness,—“blind as a bat,” for instance. It would be safe to say that there cannot be found in the animal kingdom a bat, or any other creature, so blind in its own range of circumstance and connection, as the greater majority of human beings are in the bosoms of their families. Tempers strain and recover, hearts break and heal, strength falters, fails, and comes near to giving way altogether, every day, without being noted by the closest lookers-on. ”

“ Thus trained and fortified, our young blind people will work like Trojans to prove their ability to those who doubt it, and succeed in removing one obstacle after another, until they stand ready to take equal chances with any who may be pitted against them. ”

“ That, as everyone knows, is the classical way of beginning the game of Blind Man’s Buff; and supposing that the blinded man pro tem, is properly bandaged, and cannot get a squint of light up by the side of his nose, and also supposing that he confuses himself by turning round the proper number of times honestly, he will be in profound darkness, and in utter ignorance of the direction of door, window, or the salient objects in the room. ”

“ It should astonish us in the very entry, to think we are about to speak and to hear of his majesty, ‘whom eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,’ nor hath it entered into the heart of any creature to consider what he is. Think ye, blind men could understand a pertinent discourse of light and colours? ”

“ The other day I was reading a beautiful Eastern story of a certain blind man who sat by the wayside begging; clearly a very importunate and troublesome blind man, who would by no means hold his peace, but who, nevertheless, had his heart’s desire granted unto him at last. ”