Touching the Rock
An experience of blindness
John M. Hull
Having read it
★★★★★
An honest and forthright personal examination of what it means to travel a journey into blindness.
Refreshing and comforting to read some passages and relate, albeit with different problems, to (some of) his perspective.
Humane and human.
A good passage
In 1983 the last light sensations faded and the dark discs had finally overwhelmed me. I had fought them bravely, as it seemed to me, for thirty-six years, but all to no avail. It was then I began to sink into the deep ocean, and finally learned how to touch the rock on the far side of despair.
A second good passage
When you have a lot of time, you experience time-inflation. The price of each hour goes up, not because of the cost involved in the performance of each tiny task, but because the tasks are long and take so many hours the distinct value of each hour seems to deteriorate. The increasing cost is associated with a decreasing value. The hours become cheap in contrast to the necessary tasks which must be accommodated within them. You are no longer fighting against the clock but against the task. You no longer think of the time it takes. You only think of what you have to do. It cannot be done any faster. Time, against which you previously fought, becomes simply the stream of consciousness within which you act.
A third good passage
One begins to live by other interests, other values. One begins to take up residence in another world.