On Blindness and the Senses

Learning to see is not like learning a new language. It’s like learning language for the first time. 

--Denis Diderot (as quoted by Friel in the opening pages of Molly Sweeney), Letter to the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See, 1749

Civilized society has always so misinterpreted the character of those who lack sight in their eyes; and on a basis of that misinterpretation has created the handicap of blindness. You and I know that blind people are simply people who cannot see; society believes that they are people shorn of the capacity to live normal, useful, productive lives, and that belief has largely tended to make them so.

--Dr. Jacobus tenBroek, "Within the Grace of God," address to the National Federation of the Blind, 1956

In the material, sighted world, seeing is believing. But in the realm of faith believing is not seeing; it is accepting the unknowable as fact.

--John Lahr, Light Fantastic: Adventures in Theatre, 1996

Where is bliss? How does one know when one has found it—by sight? By smell? By the vibrating of one’s blood? How do we trust our sense, and sensibilities, when others believe them deficient? These questions are biggies for anyone with the hubris to demand ecstasy from life.

--Kate Sullivan, St. Paul Pioneer Press, September 18, 1998

Just as blindness has the effect of obliterating the distinctions, so the divine omniscience transcends them. Because I am never in the light, it is equally true that I am never in the darkness. I have no fear of the darkness because I know nothing else. Nobody can turn the lights out on me.

--John M. Hull, Touching the Rock, 1990

How reconcile this world of fact with the bright world of my imagining? My darkness had been filled with the light of intelligence, and, behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness.

--Helen Keller, Out of the Dark, 1915

We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked senses sometimes see too little—but then always they see too much.

--Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, 1844