The Country of the Blind, by Andrew Leland, is the story of one man’s exploration for understanding as his vision slowly dwindles. Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) affects about 1 in 4,000 people. A genetic disorder, it results in the slow death of the individual elements which receive light at the back of the eyeball, the rods and cones. With first the rods, then the cones slowly degenerating, gradually unable to transmit signals to the optic nerve, a person with this condition will notice decreasing night vision and progressive loss of peripheral vision. Over decades, at a different pace for each individual, this incurable condition reduces vision to a small tunnel with loss of color until the light flickers out, and one is fully blind.
Leland, a writer and podcaster, decided in his mid-thirties to explore what the future held for him. He systematically explores various facets of blindness, learning about the organizations which advocate for the unsighted, and the government agencies which provide services to them. Along the way, he meets people with many different types of blindness, observing how they adapt the world to their condition. He provides a history of blindness activism and connects that to the larger world of discrimination and marginalized groups.
With his curious mind and investigative skills, he uncovers a broad tapestry of attitudes by and about the blind. For some, blindness is inconsequential until someone uses it to put barriers in front them. For others, their lives are totally upended by their inability to see what others take for granted. Along the way, he explores the implications of unsightedness to relations between men and women, speculating on what the “male gaze” means both to a woman who doesn’t feel the same as others if she can’t see it, and what a men might feel when judging women as prospective partners, if he can’t see them.
He provides a history of attempts at helping the blind access written communication, including the development by Louis Braille of the eponymous system for transcription words. He includes a fascinating anecdote about the author James Joyce, who had significant vision impairments when writing Finnegan’s Wake. The Irishman dictated the entire book to others, including his friend Samuel Beckett, the playwright. Leland then shows how Beckett’s Endgameprovides insight into the experience of blindness.
He dives into the potpourri of technological aids for the blind, most developed by the blind themselves. And Leland spends two weeks at a training school for the blind, mostly recent highs school graduates, to give them tools for navigating the physical world with confidence and humor. One of those students, Ahmed, tells him, “You have to be willing to get lost, and be confident in your ability to figure it out.”
Amongst these reports of his trips into the world of the blind, Leland weaves stories of how his small family reacts to his increasing blindness. His wife is a professor of comparative literature in “Western Massacheusetts” (institution unstated). They met in college, so she has made the journey of progressive vision loss with him. Together, they have a son, whose growing awareness of his father’s condition provides the unique unsentimental and accepting views of a child.
In the end, Leland has learned the deep mindfulness that navigating the world without vision requires. He adopts a technique from a Buddhist monk, Tran Nhat Hanh, who advises “half-smiling”, to meet “absolutely everything and everybody, always, with equanimity and friendliness.”
Concluding, he says he found “the experience of blindness encompasses both tragedy and beauty, the apocalyptic and the commonplace, terror and calm. This is true of most human experience: the same can be said of the process of aging, or of dying.” Leland has become not a hero, but another one of us, trying as best he can to get through life with the tools he’s been given.