BLIND FAITH

5 7 R B L I N D F A I T H G E O R G I N A K L E E G E My eyes always deceive me, but my blindness never lets me down. Here’s an example of what I mean. One late winter afternoon I caught a glimpse of the setting sun through the bedroom window. It had been a lowering, overcast day, but the clouds had lifted enough at the horizon to reveal the sun as an intense orange disk set o√ by the general grayness of the darkening sky. I thought, ‘‘Ah ha, a sunset,’’ and obedient to the writer’s imperative to pay attention to such things, sat down on the bed to watch. Time passed, but the sun did not seem to have progressed much. It remained in the same place that I had first noticed it, and appeared to be the same size and shape. Also, the sky was growing steadily darker, even though the sun’s light stayed at the same level of intensity. Still I continued to watch, thinking that if this seemed strange to me it was only because I had not been paying enough attention to sunsets lately and had grown unfamiliar with the natural course of the phenomenon. More time passed, and at last I recognized my mistake. The orange light I had taken for the sun was in fact only a sodium vapor street lamp. I have been legally blind since the age of eleven. Like most 5 8 K L E E G E Y legally blind people, I retain some residual vision. In my case, I can perceive light, color, and motion with some degree of accuracy. I cannot perceive fine details such as print on a page or features on a face. Forms appear amorphous, mutable, and with unstable outlines , threatening always to dissolve into their surroundings. I cannot tell for sure how lines and curves in a visual array come together, and I have next to no depth perception. What I was responding to on this occasion was mainly color, specifically the juxtaposition of two colors – the orange and the gray. This plus the fact that it was the correct hour for a sunset led me astray. I would not have jumped to the sunset conclusion at another hour of the day. It seems possible that a person with average vision might have made the same mistake. But a second glance would have spotted the structure of the street light and the other relevant details that I cannot make out. This incident, however, did not make me feel sad, a pang of grief for my lost vision. I have been blind too long to mourn about it. If anything, I felt a little silly about my desire to conform to some stereotypically Romantic ideal pairing of writers and sunsets. Though I try to be alert to the world around me, I am actually not that sort of writer. Beyond occasioning some mild selfmockery , the incident was just another example of what is a commonplace for me. Despite more than four decades of experience with severely impaired vision, when I rely on my vision alone, I am likely to be tricked. When I rely on my other senses, and more general knowledge about the laws of nature, I do better. In other words, my eyes always deceive me, but my blindness never lets me down. Here’s another example. In the basement of the house mentioned above there were glass blocks in the windows. When the light was right, usually early on a sunny morning, the prismatic e√ect of the blocks made flecks of iridescent light appear on the gray cement floor. Without fail, I took these flecks of light for scraps of Mylar gift wrap or confetti. I would reach down to grasp one in wonder and have my error confirmed through touch. No matter how often this occurred I never failed to be duped. When it happened a couple of days in a row, I forced myself to look before reaching down. But even when I made a deliberate e√ort to look carefully...