A New Memoir Presents Blindness as Both a Loss and a Great Gift

ANDREW LELAND HAS been going blind since high school. In college, he was formally diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition. Leland, who is a writer, editor, and educator, named his memoir The Country of the Blind, after the 1904 H.G. Wells short story in which an explorer falls down a mountain and finds himself in a village where everyone is blind. But unlike the explorer, Leland does not experience a rapid descent into blindness. Instead, for decades he has traversed the blurry middle ground of “becoming blind.” He writes, “It’s so much easier to conceive of it as a binary — you’re either blind or you’re not; you see or you don’t.” The Country of the Blind breaks down the binaries of our understanding of blindness and sightedness, and takes us on a personal and historical journey through the culture of blindness.

Blindness has always been a part of my story. My father, who has both retinitis pigmentosa and Coats disease, started to lose his eyesight in his teens and lost almost all of it by the time he was 27. But his world was not lost when blindness set in. Rather, like Leland and others with blindness, his world was still there; he just needed to learn new ways to traverse it. Growing up, I observed my father navigate the world with intention. He chopped firewood to keep us warm in the winter. He identified different denominations of currency by distinctively folding the bills. He carried a special tool to guide his pen when he signed documents.

In Leland’s memoir, he shares a memory of navigating the subway with his then infant son, Oscar. Leland felt confident in his ability to navigate while also caring for his son, despite concerned glances from other commuters.

Leland describes blindness as both a loss and a great gift, writing, “One is indeed losing an entire world, a planet’s worth of images, all those dioramas plunged into darkness. And yet the worlds that persist after blindness — in the remaining senses, in the imagination, and in the depth of feeling that has nothing to do with visuality — far exceed what’s lost.”

Leland details how he grieves what he will lose — long solo bike rides with his son — and beautifully describes what he has gained: New gestures of intimacy with his wife Lily, as they make their home accessible. His understanding of blindness as full of possibility stands in contrast with prevalent societal understandings. Leland, who is Jewish, recalls hearing an insensitive Billy Collins poem while attending a Rosh Hashanah service. In the poem, every time Collins complains about a small trouble, his mother tells him, “Fall to your knees and thank God for your eyesight.” Such displays of casual ableism are far too common in houses of worship.

Christians have often misinterpreted scriptures in ways that reinforce the notion that disability is either a life-ruining ailment in need of a miracle cure or a terrible evil caused by sin or lack of faith. Leland offers another way to understand blindness: “The experience of blindness encompasses both tragedy and beauty, the apocalyptic and the commonplace, terror and calm.” In that way, Leland explains, blindness is not so different from any other human experience: “The blind belong to our world, and we belong to theirs. It’s the same world.”