Some stories open worlds we can barely imagine. John M. Hull's extraordinary diary (1935-2015), just reissued by Adelphi, is one of them. The Australian theologian chronicles his gradual descent into total blindness at forty, and in doing so maps a territory most of us never enter. Hull touches on everything—the routines of daily life, language built around sight—but what emerges is the story of a man crossing from the sighted world into the blind world, and finding himself wholly transformed: his sense of self, his past, his relationships, his understanding of what it means to be human. He makes the journey with suffering, irony, and grace. His family travels with him too—the final pages, written by his wife, are remarkable.
"As time passes, I no longer think of myself as blind—as though I were deficient compared to sighted people—but as sighted-with-my-whole-body. A blind person is simply someone whose sense of sight has been transferred to the entire body, no longer confined to one organ." And if blindness is a state—like being young or old, male or female—"one of the natural orders of existence"—then the real problem is how to bridge these states. Tribalism and closed minds make it hard for one group to truly understand another. "The world of blindness is small, authentic, self-sufficient," Hull writes. "Yet it is surrounded and contained within a larger world—the world of sight. How can the small understand the great without jealousy, and how can the great understand the small without pity?"
Buy this book through Helpfreely.
If you're a member, a portion of your purchase will be donated to Fede e Luce. (Learn more)
Find it here: