Reflections of a Lifetime Reader
"Second Sight: Reflections of a Once-Blind Professor"

An Address Delivered by Robert V. Hine to the Conference of
Librarians Serving Blind and Physically Handicapped Individuals

Denver, Colorado
May 2, 1994

_Foreword_

     Blind and physically handicapped individuals are entitled
to a high quality, free public library service with access to
all information, books, and materials perceived as useful.  This
is the charge under which the National Library Service for the
Blind and Physically Handicapped and the network of cooperating
agencies function.

     To review and focus our mission, we invited a distinguished
user of braille and audio materials to meet with librarians and
others assembled in conference to present views from a lifetime
of reading.  Robert V. Hine was that person.  This pamphlet is
the third in a series of individual views that will be offered
in the years ahead.

Frank Kurt Cylke
Director

National Library Service for the Blind and Physically
Handicapped
Library of Congress

Washington, D.C.
September 1994

     I was particularly pleased when Frank Cylke and Michael
Moodie asked me to talk to you. I have had a long and rich
friendship with Talking Books stretching back to the time of J.
Robert Atkinson at the Los Angeles Braille Institute.  Those
were the days, before cassettes, when I remember so vividly
flipping hundreds of discs as Alexander Scourby read _War and
Peace_ and the _Iliad_ and the _Old Testament_.  How that memory
came about may be clearer if I read to you the opening paragraph
of _Second Sight_: 

     "At the age of twenty who believes a crotchety old doctor
telling him that he would be blind? The man sat there with his
round-mirrored reflector tilted on his forehead like a cartoon
Cyclops and intoned that my blindness would come eventually,
probably sooner than later, and I should start preparing--learn
braille, arrange for mobility training, all those jolly pastimes
for a recent teenager.  The place was a doctor's cold office in
Denver, where I had not been before and have never been since
(either the doctor's office or the city).  I don't think I said
much.  Being dutiful, I thanked him, I guess.  I had seen a lot
of doctors, but none had ever told me that."
     
     So here I am again, Denver.  Welcome me back.  What I say
today is a salute to the time between.  From Denver to Denver, a
kind of sandwich, a living sandwich, like a mile-high Mac, full
of challenge.

     Assuming that not many of you have read this book, perhaps
I should tell you more of that challenge.  After the Denver
prophecy, there followed about twenty years during which my
vision slowly deteriorated.  Then I was blind for fifteen years,
and I mean really blind--white cane, braille, only the barest
perception of bright light.

     My medical problem was uveitis, which treated with
cortisone gradually produces cataracts.  They cannot be operated
upon because of the uveitis, and so they grow, slowly at first;
in the end, rapidly like well-watered weeds.  Eventually they
are what Americans seldom experiences any more--dense, mature
cataracts that produce complete blindness.   

     As so many of your patrons know, one of the most traumatic
events for those with failing sight is giving up driving.  Again
let me read you a bit from _Second Sight_.

     "It was hard to give up driving.  For urban, southern
Californians, it marks the end of spontaneity.  From then on, my
schedule had to be carefully meshed with someone else's.  I was,
as Robert Murphy described the paraplegic, a passive recipient,
`waiting for the world to come to me in its own time, if at
all.'  I stopped driving at a point just before James Thurber
did.  He described some of his last times at the wheel.  'A
peril of the night road is that flecks of dust and streaks of
bug blood on the windshield look to me often like old admirals
in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front end of barges,
and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields
and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic
admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a
breath of air before retiring.'"
           
     "Oh, how I appreciate Thurber's penultimate feelings.  `I
have a curious desire to cry while driving at night, but so far
have conquered that, save for a slight consistent whimpering
that I keep up.'  Not long after that, one bids farewell to
spontaneity and quits."

     Thus it is that challenge leads to adaptation.

     Braille was my basic salvation.  Oh, Louis Braille, clever
man! Like rashes of delight your crowded pages brought in worlds
of ideas and allowed me to let them out again. . . .
     
     Standard Grade 2 braille came fairly easily, though no
one should think the transition from visual to tactile reading
comes without trauma.  There are months in which it seems those
fingers will never transmit.  I abandoned playing the guitar
since the calluses were an impediment.  Reading prevailed over
`The Foggy, Foggy Dew.'

     I went on to Grade 3, that wonderful short-hand
version, and I have praised that system every since.  When
writing this book, I wanted to emphasize my indebtedness to
braille, so I convinced the publishers to photograph braille for
the end papers; braille became indeed the beginning and the end. 
It has occurred to me, however, that the blind can't read these
passages because they're not embossed.  And very few sighted
people can read braille.  I may be the only one here who can
tell you what these end papers say.     

     As my sight deteriorated into blindness, I remained a
college professor, and one of my jobs was lecturing.  A good
lecture requires quotations to flesh it out and bring it to
life.  As my sight got fuzzier and fuzzier, milkier and milkier,
I could not read the passages I wished, and my braille was not
yet fast enough to be effective.  So I had a friend--not an
Alexander Scourby or a Bob Askey, but still a fine, dramatic
reader--record passages on tape, and it was easy enough to flip
them on when needed.  That led to combining the quotations with
contemporary slides and music, until I had fifteen-minute
presentations to tuck into lectures a dozen or fifteen times a
term.  Everyone profited. 

     As for the basic notes for the lectures, braille worked
well, except that I have to confess to a subterfuge.  In Grade 3
I could braille a great deal on 3 x 5 cards, slip them in my
jacket pocket, read them without anyone knowing, walk casually
around the front of the room, and impress everyone with my
erudition.  How blindness sharpens memory! 

     I wrote three books while I was blind.  One needs readers,
of course, for the obscure documents and rarer books.  I will
always cherish the list of my readers--wonderful students, many
of whom became genuine friends.  But here again, the road was
not without detours.  I learned the hard way that subject
material is often related to visual capacity.  When sighted, I
had become excited over artists who had drawn the American West
but who had never been there, who had drawn from their
imagination to depict a new land.  I was granted a Guggenheim
Fellowship to pursue the subject in England, and Shirley and I
pursued every painting about the American West in every gallery,
country estate, or museum in the land.  At that time, however,
my sight was failing fast, and gradually it dawned on me that
Delacroix and Bonheur and Miller called out for eyes, not ears. 
I was on the wrong track.  I was Beethoven trying to be a music
critic; Franklin Roosevelt aspiring to be a sprinter. 

     Some years into my complete blindness, I made another false
start.  I got interested in the life of Big Bill Haywood, the
anarchist Wobbly labor organizer of Western miners, particularly
in this state of Colorado.  For about a year my readers and I
delved into the biographies and the secondary material.  Slowly
I realized that Haywood was not a good subject for a blind
author.  He had been dragged constantly into the courts and
there were shelves of transactions in countless cities.  The
federal government had him on its list of dangerous individuals,
and Washington housed records that detailed his every move for
years at a time.  Going through those heaps of material without
skimming and jumping from one heading to another would have been
a horrendous task.  A sighted scholar can do that.  A reader
cannot do it for you.  I abandoned Haywood and turned instead to
another man who interested me, Josiah Royce.  He proved an ideal
subject for a blind scholar, because at the time of his death
the Royce family had destroyed mountains of his personal papers. 

     My wife is a good birder, and she knew birds by sight.  I
thought, wouldn't it be nice while she identified birds by sight
if I did the same by their call.  Together we'd make a
remarkable team.  I started listening to records, like the
supplement to the _Peterson Guide_, and I listened and listened. 
Alas.  I never was any good at distinguishing a thrush from a
finch or whatever I was supposed to distinguish.  And I gave it
up.  In _Second Sight_ I came to see the birding episode as
symptomatic of the way I reacted to blindness:

     "If that was the way it was to be, then that was the way it
was to be.  My profession not only was good economically, but it
also became a kind of retreat.  The office was so familiar,
untouched by anyone but myself.  There, I could ignore my
blindness.  There, my innate desire to work and do well was
rewarded.  It satisfied what Arnold Beisser, the disabled
psychiatrist, calls the need to live intensely.  I could even
fantasize that students really cared what I was saying, that
someone might actually want to read the books I was writing. 
Teaching evaluations were good, promotions came on schedule, and
book reviews were mildly complimentary.  Did I cease wanting my
old sight back?  Well, at least I stopped thinking much about
it.  I was perfectly prepared to live out my life, and Shirley
was prepared to live it out with me, blind. 
     
     This personal history of challenge and adaptation proved,
however, to be far from over.  The mature, dense cataracts began
to leak, the leakage caused the system to clog, and glaucoma set
in.  An emergency operation was called, but with no
expectations, since the retinas were assumed to be badly damaged
by the years of inflammation.  But when the bandages were
removed, I saw again.  There was Shirley in a striped blouse.  I
could point to the colors and say yellow and blue and red.  And
the whole doctor's office was an incredible experience--the
shining instruments, the nurse in her white-pants uniform--it
made me think of landings on the moon.

     Sight restored after long disuse does not come immediately. 
Though the lens and retina are functioning perfectly, one
doesn't see well at first.  Vision is composed of many elements,
not just light hitting the retina.  There is an interesting book
by Arthur Zadonc of Amherst, which describes two kinds of 
light--that coming from nature and that coming from the mind. 
The two meet and create vision, but without both, there is no
vision.  The latter is the light from within, and if you were a
Quaker you might call it the inner light.  The light from within
has to meet the light from without to create vision.  From a
more scientific standpoint, the brain, like an unused muscle,
has to readjust.  As Oliver Sacks wrote, "We are not given the
world; we make our world through incessant experience,
categorization, memory, reconnection."  It took me about six
months to get the vision I have now, about 20/40 corrected.

     The literature of restored vision was expanded in a May
1993 _New Yorker_ article in which Oliver Sacks described
Virgil, a 50-year-old man whose sight was restored after a
lifetime of blindness.  When the bandages were removed, Virgil
saw, true, but in another sense he only began to learn to see. 
He was mentally still blind.  The brain, which acts in this case
rather like a muscle, has atrophied from lack of use.  Or, using
an educational analogy, it needs to be taught or retaught to
see.  With Virgil, as so often, it was such a frustrating and
unhappy experience that he eventually reverted psychologically
to his blind self.  I likewise can attest to negative feelings
in those months after my sight was restored.  In my case fifteen
years was apparently enough to make me forget the world that I
had once _learned_ to see.

     The blind are paid deference in an effort to make things
easier for them.  I can remember wondering how much of my
accomplishment was based on the fact that I was blind, how much
of my credit was unearned.  When back in the race on a level
with everyone else, could I make it?  

     So on the day the bandages were removed, Shirley drove me
home, and I looked at this world again--the white and yellow
arrows and broken lines on the streets, the colors of cars, the
landscaped freeway intersections--I was Robert DeNiro in the
movie _Awakenings_.  But I was also Madeline Stowe in _Blink_,
with still fuzzy vision and a fundamental ambiguity about the
future.         

     I wanted to write down all of these feelings.  The
historian in me wanted to record it for myself.  It was too
wonderful to just let go.  So every night I sat at my brailler
(I wasn't able to read yet) and recalled experiences like
opening a kitchen cupboard and seeing the Milk of Magnesia
bottle--the most beautiful blue in the world. 

     It made me wonder what beauty is.  When you're first
getting your sight back, everything is beautiful.  That mess of
a garage of ours was truly beautiful to me--the colors, the
shapes.  I was like a child again. 

     But as I began to record these feelings, I kept wondering
how my experience compared with others.  I began reading in the
literature of the blind.  And I got terribly excited about the
people I met, people like James Thurber and Eleanor Clark and
Jacques Lusseyran.

     Lusseyran, for example, was a Frenchman, blind from the age
of eight.  During World War II his French Resistance cell
required all applicants to be interviewed by him because he was
able to judge people through their voices better than any
sighted person could ever do.  Lusseyran as a boy remembered
mothers who would not let their children play with him because
he was blind.

     He felt sorry for them, as he did all blind children who
under the guise of being protected were not allowed to find
their second world of seeing.  The greatest danger to a blind
child, Lusseyran said, comes from sighted people who imagine
that their way of seeing the world is the only way, not
listening to the blind child's way.

     I thought of that when I read a manuscript not too long ago
by an English blind philosopher, who used the word "visionist"
in the same way that we use the word "racist."  A visionist
thinks that sighted vision is the only real way to see, like the
mother of Lusseyran's blind childhood friend.  In contrast was
Lusseyran's own second visual life which he considers a stream
of light and joy. 

     "I have found where it flowed and stayed close to it,
walking beside its banks.  Doors had opened inside me leading
into a place of refuge, a cave, and everything that happened to
me entered there and was reflected a thousand times over before
it was extinguished."

     Another of my newly found blind writers was Eleanor Clark,
the novelist, who lashed back about her growing blindness: "Who
says you have to accept it, experience it, still less relish
it?"  I admired her feistiness. 

     She alternated between fury ("Go away, get under there with
the snakes, I'm sick of you") and anguish ("Secretly I yell No,
no! and shut my ears or they shut themselves").  Give me, she
said, "a good healthy capacity for gloom and despair."

     That's a very different attitude.
     
     It is easy to get mystical about the blind.  Embedded in
the myths of the race are notions that the blind are superior. 
This hit me hardest when my friend, Bill Brandon, directed me to
Ovid's story of Tiresias.  Here is a young Theban walking in the
woods and surprising two snakes mating.  He had stumbled over
the male and female wrestling in coitus over the secret of life. 
He struck them with his stick and was immediately altered into a
woman.  For seven years he lived completely female.  Then,
walking in the woods, he once more came upon serpents coupling. 
He battered them again [You'd think he would have learned,
wouldn't you?] and was restored to the gender of his birth.      
Thereafter he lived as one who had known life as both male and
female, one who was blessed with the heavenly ability to see the
other person's point of view. 

     The scene shifts to Olympus where Zeus and Hera are feuding
over the momentous issue of which sex has the greater pleasure
in love making (Zeus saying the woman; Hera, the man.)  [You'd
think the gods had better things to do.]  In desperation they
summoned Tiresias, graced with the gift to see both sides, to
settle their argument.  He sided with Zeus.

     "If the parts of love pleasure
     be counted as ten,
     Thrice three go to women,
     one only to men."

     Hera, furious with the verdict, struck Tiresias blind.  
Unable to counter his wife's curse, but pitying the begetter of
his victory, Zeus endowed Tiresias with prophecy.  So the blind
prophet strode through Greek mythology as the wise man to whom
heroes, including the great Odysseus, repaired for guidance. 

     Now, it should be clear that, when blind, I never felt
superior to anyone, believe me.  I certainly did not see 
me . . . as blessed with any special insights on sex.  Yet the
story caused me to wonder if I might not be in an unusual
position to say something about blindness and sight.  Though I
never felt prophetic, I am willing to acknowledge that blind men
like Lusseyran . . . have used their blindness in ways that
suggest modern Tiresiases.  And it is sobering to remember that
[Lusseyran contends] that all blind people could have these
gifts did not society relentlessly teach that the blind cannot
see.

     More often than making them prophets, we say the blind have
special keenness in their other senses, remarkable hearing,
incredible smell or touch, phenomenal memories. 

     If we can elevate the blind or near-blind, we can also
diminish them.  Sight seems so crucial to most of us that to
lose it is to lose an essential part of our selves.  We're then
not whole.  We're a vehicle minus a wheel, a cart without a
horse, a lizard without a tail.  But I suggest considerable care
when you think that.

     The blind have their own ways of seeing, rich in
imagination, often flooded with inner light.  Their selves have
not been violated.  They are not made saints or prophets by
their blindness, but neither have they lost any measure of their
whole selves and their potentials.  Their challenge is to
communicate their abilities; yours is to recognize and reward
them.  Society's challenge is to give you the resources to do
so.  When those resources become pinched, the effect sends a
shiver along the whole chain, but the challenge can and must be
met. 

     I close with the last words in _Second Sight_ because I
think they relate to what we're saying about challenge and about
adaptation:

     "Barring the unforeseen, it seems that the overall pattern
of my life will be the initial birth out of womb-blindness into
sight, the descent into fifteen years of another blindness, and
then the rebirth into sight.  There will be one final plunge, I
know, one last blindness (or one last sight?).  When that comes,
I stand fortunate, because like Tiresias, I have tasted the two
alternatives before."

     Unlike Tiresias, I will not advise the gods on sex . . .
and not even on the delights of darkness and light.  If they
were to question me on blindness and sight, if one like Hera
suggested that I renounce my wicked ways of seeing to understand
my former sightlessness, I think I would mumble a few words
about the two faces of reality.  I might revive the old clich
that sighted or blind, we are all disabled.  I would beg
forgiveness that I had once aspired to become a mini-king in the
country of the blind.  And I would try to recite a poem I read
somewhere about every singing bird concealing within itself "a
bat in love with darkness."

     Thank you very much for having me.

Robert V. Hine
Denver, Colorado

Professor Recalled, University of California, Irvine 1990-
University of California, Riverside 1954-1990
     Chairman, Department of History 1962-1967
In-residence, University of California, Santa Cruz (Kresge
     College) 1973

Huntington Library Fellowships 1952, 1954, 1961; Pacific Coast
Branch, American Historical Association Book Award 1953;
Guggenheim Fellowships 1957, 1968; E. Harris Harbison Award for
Distinguished Teaching (Danforth Foundation) 1967; Distinguished
Teaching Award, Academic Senate, University of California,
Riverside 1968; National Endowment for the Humanities Senior
Fellow 1977; California Historical Society Award of Merit 1977
and Henry R. Wagner Memorial Award 1986; Southern California
Historical Society Fellow 1990; Western History Association,
Honorary Life Membership 1990

B.A., Pomona College; M.A. and PhD., Yale University

_California's Utopian Colonies_ (1953); _Edward Kern and
American Expansion_ (1962); _The American West:  An Interpretive
History (1973) (RC 23190); _Community on the American Frontier: 
Separate but Not Alone (1980) (RC 22805); _Josiah Royce: From
Grass Valley to Harvard_ (1992); _Second Sight_ (1993) (RC
37336)

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