Science, art, philosophy, even politics—it all started with the Greeks. At least that's what my pre-multicultural schooling taught me. And the Greek who gave Western literature its initial push was Homer, the blind bard who, in the eighth century b.c., wandered from one rich man's table to another, reciting the adventures of heroes and gods. Today, most classical scholars deem those epics previously attributed to Homer to be the composite creation of many poets. Unfortunately, the scholars never mention those putative poets' ophthalmic condition.

How blindness affects writers has been a salient concern of mine ever since I began losing my sight five years ago. Americans, whatever their work, fear blindness more than any other physical affliction except cancer. Of course, affliction is not a word often applied to such conditions anymore. Instead, we use "disability," though even that term is challenged by the more militant wing of organizations representing the interests of—to use biblical taxonomy—the maimed, the halt, and the blind. And though I am more sympathetic with such concerns than I was five years ago, I nonetheless find the monosyllable that designates my own condition appropriately blunt. Blind.

Disabled certainly doesn't fit Homer's seer, Tiresias of Thebes, who was struck blind by Athena for peeking at her while she bathed. To compensate for the loss of his sight, the goddess generously granted him the gift of prophecy. A dubious reward, as Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex makes clear. Whoever believes prophets, blind or otherwise, in literature?

Nevertheless, in many and diverse cultures, prophets are often blind, as if not being able to look out at the world, they are endowed with special powers of looking inward. Like the fools who speak much sense in Shakespeare's plays, blind literary characters often fill the paradoxical role of seer. And whether or not Homer existed, the poems traditionally attributed to him have influenced other blind writers of note, among them John Milton, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges.

As a young man, Milton consciously set about educating himself to be a poet by studying classical languages. In Paradise Lost he braids together the strands of biblical and Homeric allusions so tightly that the first three chapters of Genesis have had a distinctly Greek flavor for subsequent generations. By transforming the simple pastoral story of Eden into a grand epic of celestial warfare, Milton reinvented Satan as an upstart god challenging a Homeric Zeus. Thus, he solidified our near-Manichaean picture of the cosmic struggle between good and evil.

Homer aside, what other signs show that blindness affected Milton's writing? When civil war broke England apart along religious lines, Milton made the conscious decision to sacrifice his literary ambition for the sake of the Puritan cause. He served as Cromwell's Latin secretary (international documents and letters were written in this universal scholar's language). Giving up his poetical ambitions, Milton claimed he had worn out his eyes in these labors, but the real cause of his blindness has not been firmly established. Some researchers speculate that he lost his sight to diabetes. The Royalists posited their own explanation: Milton's blindness was God's judgment on him for supporting Charles I's beheading.

In 1652, Milton was functionally blind. By 1657, his visual difficulties demanded he take on an amanuensis, the poet Andrew Marvell, who later helped to secure Milton's pardon when Charles II was restored to the throne. The royal clemency proved to be well rewarded. Seven years later, Milton gave the world Paradise Lost, whose effects still reverberate in Western culture. But how did a blind man manage to come up with a 12-book poem? And without the computer-based "adaptive technology" of the sort that enables me to keep writing?

Milton, of course, did have the mnemonic advantage of being a poet. Poetry is far easier to memorize than prose. Think of how snatches of songs lodge in our minds, regardless of our intention to retain them. Even now you can probably recall nursery rhymes you haven't repeated since childhood.

Milton rarely commented directly upon his blindness, except for the famous 1652 sonnet "On His Blindness." When I first read this poem as a student, Milton's reference to his age was what struck me most: "When I consider how my light is spent / E're half my days, in this dark world and wide." The loss of productive years seemed the great tragedy to me then. Now I hear the sorrow for lost sight that seeps through the words like blood through a bandage. Despite the self-abnegation of the last line, "They also serve who only stand and wait," his acquiescence to a chiding and exacting God seems wrung from him at a great cost.

Milton never uses the word "blind" in the entire poem, alluding to his loss only as light either "spent" or "denied." The reason he mourns this loss, however, is clear. He expects that the "one Talent which is death to hide" will now prove "useless." In that terrible year when the light finally went out altogether, he was left bereft of any hope of writing poetry. He could not have known then how wrong he was.

A story grew up that the blind poet dictated his masterpiece to his three daughters. Samuel Johnson, in his Life of Milton, discounts this report by pointing out the daughters' lack of sufficient education. Milton—so the skeptics insist—pressed into service those visitors who possessed sufficient learning and adequate penmanship to record his latest lines.

Still, the image of the poet dictating to his daughters persists. One of Milton's admirers reported that the poet would lie awake composing verses in his head. If inspiration struck in the middle of the night, he would summon a daughter from her bed to take down the words lest they should be lost again in sleep. Milton was said to dictate up to 40 lines at a time. His daughters commented that their father was like a cow, waiting to be milked of his pent-up words in the morning.

James Joyce, for the most part, wrote novels instead of poetry. As Susan Sontag has observed, "prose writers, who work in a lumberyard of words, can't hold it all in their heads."1 (Some critics have suggested that this difficulty is precisely what accounts for that jumble of a lumberyard, Finnegans Wake.)

Like Milton, Joyce was drawn into Homer's orbit. But while Milton had modeled his imagination on Homer's world of heroes and gods, Joyce's aim was to turn that world on its head. Joyce's Ulysses borrows its title, format, and main characters from Homeric epic, but Leopold Bloom is no hero and the promiscuous Molly no faithful Penelope.

Milton and Joyce were also both rebels and subversives. Though Milton slaved away in the service of the Commonwealth, his religion was no party-line Puritanism, as anyone who reads Areopagitica and his defense of divorce can see. Stephen Dedalus, the autobiographical protagonist of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, echoes the famous words of Milton's Satan: "Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven." Dedalus vows "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe." His renunciation includes family, fatherland, and church.

The 20-year-old Joyce left Dublin for Paris and, five years later, was diagnosed with glaucoma. Unfortunately, one cannot simply renounce this condition. Even in childhood, Joyce's eyes had been bad. A passage in Portrait of an Artist describes the young Stephen trying to make out the headlines of a newspaper: "But the lines of the letters were like fine invisible threads and it was only by closing his right eye tight and staring out of the left eye that he could make out the full curves of the capital."

As an adult, Joyce was frequently plagued by what was then called "iritis," an inflammation of the iris. Not until 1917, at the age of 35, was he diagnosed with a rarer form of the disease called closed or narrow-angle glaucoma. Not only does this form cause its victims intense, incapacitating pain, but unless relieved, it can cause sudden and total blindness.

At that time, narrow-angle glaucoma was treated surgically by cutting out sections of the iris, to reduce the internal pressure in the eye, but the first such operation on Joyce's right eye did not halt the disease's progression or seem to mitigate the pain. For the next few years various doctors prescribed various modes of treatment; when especially severe attacks occurred, the pain was treated with cocaine. In 1924, Joyce had an iridectomy on his left eye and, a few months later, a cataract removed from the same eye, after which he began wearing an eye-patch. He underwent more surgery the following year, but it did no good.

Despite the difficulties, Joyce's determination to continue writing was as absolute as Milton's had been. Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego, announced at the end of Portrait that he was setting out "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race," a purpose as hubristical as Milton's goal of "justifying the ways of God to man."

Did their blindness make these two inheritors of Homer even more defiant? Did Milton include his blindness in his private list of grievances against God that needed justifying? Without the painful condition that early set him apart from other children, would Joyce have cast his novels so audaciously adrift upon the stream of consciousness?

We cannot know the final answers to those questions, of course. But Joyce, in a rare comment on his blindness, once allowed that, "Of all the things that have happened to me, I think the most important was having been blind."

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, displayed none of Milton's and Joyce's spirit of overt rebellion. Far more conservative than either, at least in his private life and political leanings, he described himself as "neither a thinker nor a moralist, but simply a man of letters who turns his own perplexities and that respected system of perplexities we call philosophy into the forms of literature."

Blindness proved one of Borges' most troubling perplexities. More forthcoming about his lack of sight than either Milton or Joyce, he never ceased to wonder at the divine irony that had made him director of Argentina's National Library at the precise point when his blindness finally became total. "I was given the gift of almost a million books at the time I became unable to read even the titles on the spines," he wrote.

Both Borges' father and grandmother had died "blind, laughing, and brave." He speculated that he had inherited his blindness, but added "one does not inherit courage." He describes his own condition as "a modest blindness" (one eye could still see luminous patches of blue and green) and "not especially dramatic," since it came on like a "slow nightfall" over decades. In a lecture given at a Puerto Rican university, the 80-year-old Borges sounds philosophical about his condition:

For the task of an artist, blindness is not a total misfortune. … A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument. Everything has been given for an end … so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so. If a blind man thinks this way, he is saved. Blindness is a gift.2

This claim is no refrigerator-magnet proverb, exhorting us to make lemonade from lemons. A gift implies intention, not random happenstance. It bestows purpose on the life of the recipient, though few would willingly embrace such a paradoxical gift.

Indeed, Borges was not always so sanguine about his blindness. Following a lecture in which he aligned himself with the arch-pessimist Schopenhauer, a student challenged him, asking how he could reconcile such dark views with his previous designation of blindness as a gift. Borges turned his sightless gaze in the general direction of his questioner. "Blindness is the great tragedy of my life," he said. "I assure you there is no heroism in blindness, only pain."

Though their collective literary output was wide-ranging and deep, none of these three eminent writers—Milton, Joyce, or Borges—ever tells us what it is like to go blind. I have recently discovered someone who does: John Hull, a British theology professor at the University of Birmingham. When the renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose own books describing various physical deficits are widely known, reviewed Hull's book Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, he found it a "marvelous description of inner states and adaptations, descriptions which have no hint of self-pity whatever, but are luminous testimonies to what it is like."3 Indeed, Sacks finds Touching the Rock unprecedented in its depth and detail in recounting the sightless state. Sacks' knowledge of the literature of neurological deficits far exceeds my own, so I'm taking his word for Hull's distinctiveness.

His book doesn't make especially sunny reading—or in my case, listening—for someone still on that journey toward darkness. Hull points out that no other sensory deprivation dislocates a person from his surroundings as thoroughly as blindness. "Apart from the white cane and the sounds from the environment, the body's knowledge of its surroundings does not exceed its own dimensions," he explains. "The body itself has become the organ of sense." He can only know he is not alone by the sound of footsteps on a path or the voices of his children playing nearby as he listens from his park bench. When those sounds cease, the world itself disappears.

At first, Hull recoils from such an inconstant world. Although he had experienced some visual impairment early in life, darkness fell on Hull suddenly following an unsuccessful surgery. His book covers a five-year period of adjustment to total blindness. After his initial withdrawal, he grows numb, overcome by "a strange feeling that he is becoming more and more unreal." When assaulted by sensory input he cannot decipher or control—most of it generated by the young children in his household—he frequently retreats into sleep.

Even worse, Hull finds that after five years, he is losing his visual memory. Only by tracing the numeral three in the air can he recall if it opens to the left or right. He can no longer recall precisely what his wife and children look like. Though Hull himself still dreams visually, a correspondent, blind for 45 years, reports his dreams are now filled only with vague shapes and sounds. Hull wonders how much longer he will be able to retain any visual memory of his wife and children.

As for me, the prospect of losing my vision altogether troubles me, of course. But like the frog in the proverbial pot of water who doesn't notice that the temperature is gradually rising, I have been blessed with plenty of adjustment time. Nevertheless, to lose one's visual memory of significant people and places—this prospect fills me with dread. I am consoled by the knowledge that, at my age, I may not outlive my visual memory entirely. And like Borges, I suspect that, for a writer, blindness can be a gift, and agree with his happier side that all conditions, however miserable, have a purpose, an end. In this, Borges echoes Saint Paul: "I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content" (Phil. 4:11).

Forty-five years ago Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend about her experience with lupus, the disease that finally killed her. "I've never been anywhere but sick," she said. "In a sense, sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow."

Blindness is something like that. It shuts you off from normal. No amount of denial can alter this reality. Creating a semantic smokescreen of euphemisms will not alleviate the isolation.

While I understand the demands of the militantly disabled to be treated like everyone else, I know that blindness will mark my identity for the rest of my mortal life. Simply being unable to operate in the culturally essential spheres of driving and reading makes me, at best, a passive participant in the culture. I must ask a bank clerk to place a finger on the line where I sign my name. I must wait for some kind soul to collect and deliver me to my destination like a package. Blindness will become my most frequently remarked upon characteristic. I will lose whatever social buoyancy my sighted self had.

But listening to John Hull describe his own descent into darkness and how that disaster achieved meaning gives me a new way of metaphorically looking at things. Hull feels "no stoical resignation before an inscrutable destiny, no gritting of the teeth, no acceptance, however courageous, of a meaningless destiny." Indeed, he says it "would not be a Christian act to accept blindness or try to go on as if it had not happened, or to defy it through mere courage." Instead, his Christian faith compels him "to probe the experience, to grapple with it, to strip off layer after layer from it, to find meaning within it, and to relate that meaning to the other parts or aspects of living."

Blindness can be, as O'Connor said of her illness, instructive. When you live in the dark, reality either shrinks to self-consciousness or expands beyond the horizon. You live in spatial infinity. The line between the visible and invisible disappears. When you grope for the world's edges in order to orient yourself, you're as likely to stumble into metaphysical questions as physical barriers.

John Hull learned that his life is a part of a larger reality, "and," he says, "if I am coherent with the larger whole, I will again be whole myself." This wholeness does not necessarily depend on having one's limbs or hearing or eyes restored to their original factory settings. Being whole is what we all—sick, lame, blind, and normal—want at our deepest level. Sometimes, in fact, blindness makes us see that more clearly.

Virginia Stem Owens in a novelist, essayist, and poet living in Texas. With her husband, David Clinton Owens, she is the author of Living Next Door to the Death House, just published by Eerdmans.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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1. Susan Sontag, "Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed," The New York Times, December 18, 2000.

2. Borges' lecture is quoted in "Reaching the Center" by Rosario Ferre, translated by Hoyt Rogers, Pen America: A Journal for Readers and Writers, (Spring 2001).

3. Oliver Sacks, "The 'Dark, Paradoxical Gift,' " The New York Review of Books, April 11, 1991. Review of John M. Hull, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (Pantheon, 1991).