Cathy Rentzenbrink
Why do we read? Sometimes I’m looking for comfort, consolation, distraction or entertainment. Other times I’m seeking to learn new things and to walk a mile in another’s shoes. Perhaps especially when I read memoir, I want to understand and know another human being through the rendering of their world. On rare occasions, all of the above pulls together and I enjoy a deep sense of satisfaction that not only has my reading time been well spent but that I am somehow changed, that what I have learned has shed light on my own journey through this extraordinary life. Notes on Blindness satisfies all these readerly desires and is a beautiful example of how the best books are simultaneously intensely specific but have universal meaning.
John Hull was an academic and theologian who was registered blind in 1980, around the same time as the birth of his second child. Initially he was preoccupied with the excitement of problem-solving and discovery as he figured out how to live and work. It was three years later as the last light sensations faded and he travelled further into what he calls ‘deep blindness’ that he began recording the observations about his life that form this book on audio cassette, charting the progression from being ‘a sighted person who could not see to being a blind person.’
This is a practical as well as a metaphorical journey. Hull can navigate himself between home and work very successfully using his cane and the hazards he encounters are more often human than object. He observes how tricky it is for a sighted person to understand that the cane is a tool to enlarge his field of perception, not something he wants to lean upon for support. It is a seeing stick rather than a walking stick, but aspiring helpers will grab and point with it, failing to grasp that he can’t see what they are doing. Not everyone is so well-intentioned. There are taunts from unknown men in the street who shout about imaginary cars or accuse him of being a fraud. What feels perhaps more shocking than this random cruelty is when acquaintances tease him by wanting him to identify them by voice, rather than sensibly introducing themselves. These silly games make Hull feel like he is in the middle of a game of Blind Man’s Buff.
Human connection is based on reciprocity but, of course, Hull still wants to be fully seen even though he can no longer see. He tells us about becoming disabled, feeling that he has lost part of his manhood and part of his humanity. He often finds himself being discussed as though he were a child as people ignore him to ask his wife what he wants to do.
What is it like to no longer see the workings of time upon one’s face, or the faces of loved ones? Hull is distressed when he can no longer conjure the image of his wife or his eldest child in his mind’s eye. He has never seen the younger ones. Surrounded by children at a birthday party, Hull realizes that he doesn’t know whether the child happily scrambling about on his lap is his own, and can’t work out how to ask.
As Hull continues to contemplate the curious nature of his new life, a portrait emerges of a warm, intelligent and reflective man trying to make sense not only of his blindness, but of blindness itself. Work and new ideas are central to Hull’s wellbeing, to the extent that even a single day away from study leaves him less able to grapple with despair. He can’t write a stoic or matter-of-fact book, he tells us, but his quest for understanding will help to keep him sane.
Hull’s observations on the central question of his attitude towards his blindness are very relevant to coping with any sort of adversity that sees us in the presence of a reality we wish to refuse. Here he poses the dilemma: ‘If I were to accept this thing, if I were to acquiesce, then I would die. It would be as if my ability to fight back, my will to resist were broken. On the other hand, not to acquiesce, not to accept, seems futile. What I am refusing to accept is a fact.’
Towards the end of the book Hull finds a middle ground between the stark binaries of acceptance and rejection. He calls this ‘integration’ and it leads to another stage on the journey: ‘As one goes deeper and deeper into blindness, the things which once were taken for granted, and which were then mourned over as they disappeared, and for which one tried various ways to find compensation, in the end cease to matter. Somehow it no longer seems important what people look like, or what cities look like … one begins to take up residence in another world.’
Where once Hull might have appreciated a pretty church, now he is flooded with joy at the sound of the bells. He can tell whether a light is on by lifting his face to it, notes that his skin has become more sensitive to changes in the wind and the sun. He begins to think of himself as a whole-body-seer: ‘A blind person is simply someone in whom the specialist function of sight is now devolved upon the whole body, and no longer specialised in a particular organ.’
Is there meaning to be found in the blindness? Often people ask Hull about the workings of providence and he is sanguine about the accidental nature of his situation. Born in an earlier time, he’d have lost his sight sooner, born in the future, it may well have been saved, but we can transform the accidental events of our lives so they carry purpose: ‘The most important thing in life is not happiness but meaning. Happiness is the product of chains of accident which tend towards our well-being. Blindness does not make me happy. I did not choose it, nor was it inflicted upon me. Nevertheless, as an accidental event it could become meaningful.’
John Hull died in 2015. He is survived by his five children and his widow Marilyn who has written an epilogue for this new edition. There is wisdom on every page of the finely wrought piece of self-interrogation he has left behind. These dispatches from the dark but also from the light will stay with me a long time. What a gift it is to the whole of humanity when one person writes with honesty and clarity about the way they experience their world.