You may love Raymond Carver or hate him, find the American writer and poet—father of literary minimalism—utterly unmemorable. But we urge you to read (or reread) his story Cathedral, now collected in the rich anthology Spiritual Stories (Einaudi 2020), edited by Armando Buonaiuto.
A widower visits the narrator's home for the night. The visit is unwelcome. The narrator makes no effort to hide it. A few brushstrokes suffice: he is a misanthrope without friends—or so his wife claims—bitter, awash in clichés. The fact that his guest is blind makes everything worse, or so he thinks. That the narrator doesn't bother to learn his guest's name, Robert, until page six speaks volumes about his clouded vision.
It takes the whole evening—dinner, the long hours after—for the protagonist to truly see Robert. And to see him through the blind man's senses, not his own. This is the classic Carver detail: the small thing that upends everything. By the end, the narrator is shaken. Transformed.
"The blind man takes a sheet of paper from the table," Buonaiuto writes in his commentary that follows the story. "He closes his hand over the narrator's: 'Draw. You will see.' In that you will see lies not merely a command, but a promise that recalls the Gospel account of the blind man of Bethsaida. Yet Carver seems to turn the story inside out. It is not the sighted man who heals the blind; Robert, the blind man, heals the sighted. And it is striking how in Mark's Gospel, as in Carver's pages, the healing hands must be laid twice before vision becomes complete."
Buonaiuto's parallels intrigue, especially his note that vision can deepen even after the deus ex machina arrives. But for Carver's narrator, there is no return to health—no healing in the conventional sense. For this bitter, disagreeable man, habitant of Carver's world, there is instead a total reversal. Absolute. The dynamite of connection. "I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like I was inside anything." At last.