Before I read Oliver Sacks' article dealing with Virgil's sight recovering, I tried to guess what would happen if an adult who has been blind for a lifetime had recovered his vision. On this paper, I will confront my hunches to what really happened on the article. When I started thinking about what could happen to someone facing a real change like recovering his sight, in the first place I tried to imagine what could it be to be blind, and what are the consequences of blindness on the person. I understood that blindness wasn't a bad thing or a disease. In fact, blind people are not living in a poorer condition than seeing people. It is true that they are bereft of one of their senses, but they are developing their other senses just like touching, Being blind let him the right to imagine and create his own world and doesn't makes him live in a world where the reality imposes itself on him. I thought this because I tried to figure out what could happen on a blind person's mind and what they can imagine and more precisely, how they imagine things. At this point I understood that their imagination was helping them to create their own world. On his article, Oliver Sacks said that by recovering his sight, Virgil felt losing his identity and giving up the world he grew up in. He wasn't blind anymore, he was trying to live with his recently recovered sight as we can see in the text "when they are confronted with the "gift" of sight and with the necessity of renouncing one world, one identity for another" (page I believed that it will be hard for this person to adapthimself to the new world he will discover. This person won't have enough experience to recognize things, and it will be very hard to learn to live in a new world. In the article, Virgil was facing a lot of hardships due to his undeveloped visual memory and his low capacity to recognize trivial things, or something basic such as animals. For example he was always confounding his dog and his cat because he couldn't understand the perspective, the angles ... Seeing people are improving these skills all their life, so they are not making a real effort to see and recognize something. For Virgil, a blind person that recovered vision, he had to practise a lot, to improve these skills that seeing people already acquired "It is no effort for the normally sighted to construct shapes, boundaries (...) they have been making such visual constructs, a visual world, from the moment of birth" (page 68). As we can see in Oliver Sacks' article, Virgil is compared to a baby who is learning to see, to leave in the surrounding world "like a baby just starting to see" (page
The author Edward Bloor utilizes blindness to symbolize how Paul may be visually impaired but can see social injustice, while Erik and his parents’ can see but are blind to the emotional harm they inflict on Paul and others, and the townspeople are blind to their environment and social prejudice. He has been bullied most of his life for being visually impaired. Paul is used to being judged by others. The injury to his eyes supposedly occurred while looking at a solar eclipse, but there is more to this story.
Within Oliver Sacks, “To See and Not See”, the reader is introduced to Virgil, a blind man who gains the ability to see, but then decides to go back to being blind. Within this story Sacks considers Virgil fortunate due to him being able to go back to the life he once lived. This is contrasted by Dr. P, in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat”, Sacks states that his condition is “tragic” (Sacks, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat (13) due to the fact that his life will be forever altered by his condition. This thought process can be contributed to the ideas that: it is difficult to link physical objects and conceptualized meanings without prior experience, the cultures surrounding both individuals are different, and how they will carry on with their lives.
The narrator’s prejudice makes him emotionally blind. His inability to see past Robert’s disability stops him from seeing the reality of any relationship or person in the story. And while he admits some things are simply beyond his understanding, he is unaware he is so completely blind to the reality of the world.
His, "idea of blindness came from the movies", where, "...the blind move slowly and never laughed" (Carver 98). These misconceptions of blindness form barriers between the blind and the sighted. Carver breaks down these barriers as he brings the vastly different lives of these two men together. Those of us with sight find it difficult to identify with the blind. This man, like most of us, can only try to imagine what life is like for Robert.
In the short story Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, there is a direct contrast between a blind man named Robert, and the narrator. The narrator has full use of his senses, and yet he is limited to the way he sees things, and the way he thinks. Robert however, has a very different outlook on life and how he sees things, as well as the use of his senses. At the end of the story, Robert has the narrator close his eyes to try and get him to experience the world the way he does. The narrator ends up being able to not only see the way Robert does, but he also is able to feel the world in a completely different way. The author suggests that the mind is most important in how people view things, and the judgements we make are based on what we see in our heads, instead of what is really there.
The limitations that were holding the narrator back were abolished through a process from which a blind man, in some sense, cured a physically healthy man. The blind man cured the narrator of these limitations, and opened him up to a whole world of new possibilities. Robert enabled the narrator to view the world in a whole new way, a way without the heavy weights of prejudice, jealousy, and insecurity holding him down. The blind man shows the narrator how to see.
The husband in Raymond Carvers “Cathedral” wasn’t enthusiastic about his wife’s old friend, whom was a blind man coming over to spend the night with them. His wife had kept in touch with the blind man since she worked for him in Seattle years ago. He didn’t know the blind man; he only heard tapes and stories about him. The man being blind bothered him, “My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to. (Carver 137)” The husband doesn’t suspect his ideas of blind people to be anything else. The husband is already judging what the blind man will be like without even getting to actually know him. It seems he has judged too soon as his ideas of the blind man change and he gets a better understanding of not only the blind man, but his self as well.
References to eyesight and vision, both literal and metaphorical, are very frequent in all three of the Theban plays. Quite often, the image of clear vision is used as a metaphor for knowledge and insight. In fact, this metaphor is so much a part of the Greek way of thinking that it is almost not a metaphor at all, just as in modern English: to say “I see the truth” or “I see the way things are” is a perfectly ordinary use of language. However, the references to eyesight and insight in these plays form a meaningful pattern in combination with the references to literal and metaphorical blindness. Oedipus is famed for his clear-sightedness and quick comprehension, but he discovers that he has been blind to the truth for many years, and then he blinds himself so as not to have to look on his own children/siblings. Creon is prone to a similar blindness to the truth in Antigone. Though blind, the aging Oedipus finally acquires a limited prophetic vision. Tiresias is blind, yet he sees farther than others. Overall, the plays seem to say that human beings can demonstrate remarkable powers of intellectual penetration and insight, and that they have a great capacity for knowledge, but that even the smartest human being is liable to error, that the human capability for knowledge is ultimately quite limited and unreliable.
...ts any responses that refute this idea. Then he would have to open his eyes to the reality that nothing is ever truly lost.. sacks writes “to release their own creative capacities and emotional selves, and both have achieved a right and full realization of their own individual worlds”(317). Therefore each individual blind human being is content with the way they experience life. For Carr this might be a bitter truth that deep reading will survive just not in the quantity that he desires. Unfortunately the removal of technology is not a simple solution. We need people to experience certain losses so that the human race can progress and prosper. The blinds ability to adapt and live on with a sense of comfort and peace because of this pseud sight. Is proof that even when you lose something significant you might just get something in return you never thought you would.
Vision is something many people take for granted every day. Society only deals with the matter of being blind if they are the less fortunate ones. According to the Braille Institute, "every seven minutes a person in the United States loses their sight, often as part of the aging process" (1). Only two percent of legally blind people use a guide dog and thirty-five percent use a white cane. Blindness can be caused from various different types of things including (in order) age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and age-related cataracts. (Braille 1). However being blind does not mean a person is in total darkness. Some people can see lights and the shapes of objects, but the most import thing is for family and friends to provide hope and encouragement. The last thing a person who has lost their sight wants is to lose their family and support, which will led to loneliness. Likewise, in the short story "Cathedral," by Raymond Carver's, blindness is the key element in the story and shows in detail how the characters manage it. The theme Carver conveys in the short story is being able to see without sight and is revealed through the characters, tone and plot of the story.
Many times people are blind to the truth that is right in front of them. The solution to their problems may have been blatantly obvious, however, they could not actually “see” their answer by their blindness to the truth. There have been instances where being blind is not actually a handicap, but more of a tool to see things to a deeper meaning. Although the blind may not have physical sight, they have another kind of vision. In Sophocles’ play, Oedipus the King, Tiresias, the blind prophet, addresses the truth of the prophecy to Oedipus and Jocasta. Oedipus has been blind to the truth of the prophecy of killing his father and marrying his mother his whole life. Once Oedipus discovers the truth, he loses his physical vision by blinding himself. Within these cases, the central theme of blindness can be expressed by Oedipus’s ignorance to see the higher vision- the truth
In the first paragraph, the narrator also reveals his ignorance. He believes that all blind people are based on only what he has seen in movies, "My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they are led by seeing-eye dogs “(104). The narrator was surprised when he noticed Robert was not like this. The narrator is also surprised when Robert lights a cigarette. He believes blind people don’t smoke because “they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled” (108). The husband starts to feel more comfortable after this. The three of them sit down for dinner and the husbands is impressed with the how Robert is able to locate his food, cut with a knife, and eat properly. This is where the narrator’s outlook starts to undergo change.
In Oedipus the King, Sophocles uses Oedipus and various other characters to convey the theme of blindness. King Oedipus ruled over Thebes, after solving the Sphinx’s riddle. After Oedipus is victorious over the sphinx, Oedipus becomes swollen with hubris leading into his figurative and literal blindness throughout the book. The author, Sophocles uses a blind seer to convey the sense that a physically blind man can know more about the issues concerning Thebes over their respected rulers Oedipus, and Jocasta who were not physically blind like the blind seer. Oedipus was not only just blind to the issues concerning Thebes he was blind to almost everything else. Then when the truth comes out blindness is even emphasized more with Oedipus blinding his self physically. His hubris is caused by many things one may be him thinking he has evaded his cursed prophecy, and even having his own townspeople pray to him as if he were one of the God’s. Blindness in Oedipus Rex was both literal and figurative. People can be physically blind as well as be blinded by the truth figuratively.
Everyone has a different perception than another, such a different perception that should be taken into account by other people. Whether people are blind or crazy, some people of this world are impaired so their lives are limited. The unknown can be very mind-boggling to these impaired people. Though at the same time there is a strong possibility that there are also even more unknown things to unimpaired people. Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and “Seeing” by Annie Dillard suggest that knowledge and reality are both a matter of perception based on experiences; and as such, great care should be taken by anyone who attempts to redefine the perceptions of another.
In Jorge Luis Borges’s essay, “Blindness”, the author writes to teach how blindness can be seen as an opportunity and not a curse. Though his primary audience is people that share his connection, his secondary audience could be seen as those who judge blindness to be a disability. His purpose is to prove wrong stereotypes and show his first hand experience about blindness. Borges does this by rooting out to his own and family history and lessons that he learned about his blindness. The prevailing tone is a transition from sadness toward strength and happiness.