John M. Hull's "Touching the Rock" is a masterpiece, a treatise on human perception itself.
The book details Hull's journey into total blindness after his eyes were destroyed by a long battle with cataracts and retina detachment.
What makes the book so remarkable isn't just that Hull provides such an honest, immersive understanding of what it's like to go blind -- but that his observations transcend blindness. His poetic observations offer piercing insight into what it means to be a sentient being, conscious only of that which we can sense.
There are too many extraordinary paragraphs in this novel to pick just one; here's a selection:
Page 13-14: For me, the wind has taken the place of the sun, and a nice day is a day when there is a mild breeze. This brings into life all the sounds in my environment. The leaves are rustling; bits of paper are blowing along the pavement, the walls and corners of the large buildings stand out under the impact of the wind, which I feel in my hair and on my face, in my clothes. A day on which it was merely warm would, I suppose, be quite a nice day but thunder makes it more exciting, because it suddenly gives a sense of space and distance. Thunder puts a roof over my head, a very high, vaulted ceiling of rumbling sound. I realize that I am in a big place, whereas before there was nothing there at all. The sighted person always has a roof overhead, in the form of the blue sky or the clouds, or the stars at night. The same is true for the blind person of the sound of the wind in the trees. It creates trees; one is surrounded by trees whereas before there was nothing.
Page 21: I am finding it more and more difficult to realize that people look like anything, to put any meaning to the idea that they have an appearance.
Page 47: Blindness takes away one’s territorial rights. One loses territory. The span of attention, of knowledge, retracts so that one lives in a little world. Almost all territory becomes potentially hostile. Only the area which can be touched with the body or tapped with the stick becomes a space in which one can live. The rest is unknown.
Page 50: The blind person has to remind himself all the time, when tempted to scratch his bum, that he is visible.
Page 84: For the blind person, people are in motion, they are temporal, they come and go. They come out of thing; they disappear.
