On Sight And Insight by John M Hull - 1997 - paperback - 252 pages
I’m sure you’ve wondered what it must be like to be blind – you may even have even spent a few minutes trying to get around with your eyes closed, or you may have team-built with a blindfold on. It is not the same.
John M Hull was born fully sighted but started to loose sight in his left eye as a young teenager and gradually slunk into complete Deep Blindness in 1983 at the age of 48 due to cataracts.
In his second book on the subject of his blindness “On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World of Blindness” author John Hull revisits a series of his own audio tape diaries kept between 1983 and 1991. The book examines not only his own experiences, but also examines the blind person in history as a character of wonder and pity, as a Seer, and one who is quite able to compensate with other senses.
In this intriguing interview with Philip Adams on Late Night Live from 1997, John Hull talks about what he means by Deep Blindness, how it’s different from being a sighted person who can’t see. By way of example he suggests that we try to think of a known or loved person in our lives without summoning their faces in our minds. Such reference points gradually faded from John Hull’s mind and even eventually from his dreams.
So what happens when you can’t remember what your own face looks like? How do would you cope? How do you face the fact that what memories you do have of the faces of your children, perhaps from photographs, are now completely out of date? How do you handle the claustrophobia of so much less detectable world than you used to have?
John Hall has been widely applauded for the remarkable candour of the self-analysis within “On Site and Insight”. He discloses for example how, robbed of standard visual stimulus which grants so much access to the intermediate world, his appetites for both food and sex dwindled significantly.
The interview describes the condition of blindness as “an awful boring nuisance” and given John Hall’s current occupation as Emeritus Professor of Religious Education at the University of Birmingham, it is no surprise that biblical and other mythological references to blindness are also touched upon.
Interestingly, although most descriptions of the book will talk of it as a book about blindness, those who have been blind from birth have insisted that it is in fact a book about sight.
By his own account, John M Hull’s book is an heroic story of overcoming great adversity to achieve great things, but rather a detailed emotional account of what it’s like to go blind. Two of the more touching quotes from the interview:
in the dark when you’re lying in bed holding the person you love, it doesn’t matter that you’re blind.
And from John’s wife:
The problem my darling is not that you are blind, but that I have become invisible.
You can listen to the full interview here (54 mins):
Or download the full interview with John M Hull to enjoy at your leisure (25mb).
