THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND: A Memoir at the End of Sight, by Andrew Leland
After reading Andrew Leland’s memoir, “The Country of the Blind,” you will look at the English language differently. You will even look at the word “look” differently. (And, at intervals: “reading.”)
Leland is a prolific podcaster and longtime editor at the literary magazine The Believer, whose troubles in recent years had some wags calling it The Beleaguered. He is also beleaguered by — or, his book suggests, maybe blessed with — a rare genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa that is gradually causing him to lose his vision. While posing considerable challenges, this has given him what most authors of nonfiction crave: a definitive Big Topic.
Leland’s awareness, and dread, of his disease’s progress reminded me of Charlie, the protagonist of the under-remembered “Flowers for Algernon,” who knows midway through the novel that the intelligence he’s been granted by doctors will inevitably wane. But that was a tragedy, and this is a narrative of adventure travel, bumpy but rewarding.
For now, Leland is mostly a visitor to the “country of the blind,” a title borrowed from an H.G. Wells short story: preparing for what, barring medical breakthroughs, will be permanent residence. He’s studied its customs and concerns, and his liminal state lets him act as tour guide to an oblivious sighted citizenry.
Wells’s story is but the first of Leland’s many literary allusions, blindness being a classic allegory: Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex”; Beckett’s “Endgame”; Shakespeare’s “King Lear” (intermittently waggish himself, Leland, a grandson of the playwright Neil Simon, considers naming a podcast Vile Jelly, after Cornwall’s famously brutal line).
Throughout history, it’s also been a trait that adds dimensions to authorship and artistry. Homer is believed to have been blind; John Milton definitely was. So, little by little, became Jorge Luis Borges (“A Blind Writer With Insight,” read the head-smacking headline of a 1971 profile in The New York Times), and James Joyce, whose friend Beckett helped him by taking dictation of “Finnegans Wake”: “a supremely aural (and oral) novel,” Leland reminds, “full of multilingual puns and invented onomatopoeia.”
His own prose is jazzy and intelligent: loaded with statistics and studies in some places, lyrical elsewhere, with licks of understated humor. Blindness is not usually the blackout that many sighted people imagine, Leland takes care to explain, but “an efflorescence of blind varietals” with different kinds of lights, shadings, colors: some disturbing, some soothing, all interesting. (Anyone myopic — for whom taking out contact lenses at night and throwing the day’s cares into soft focus is part of the sleep ritual — can relate.)
He notes how “the expression on the face of a blind gazer paused in the world takes on an inwardly whirring, computational, deep-listening aspect” and describes, perfectly, feeling “pinned to my chair by a soft harpoon” when a macho acquaintance, “chewing the meat he’d grilled,” interrogates Leland’s wife at a backyard barbecue about being married to a blind man.
The second half of his wife’s hyphenated surname is Wachter, which means, in one of life’s lovely linguistic felicities, “Watcher,” and Leland slips in deadpan that they met on a blind date. He’s forthright about their conflicts and grateful when she speaks out about ableism, as when a rabbi at their synagogue reads a poem that exhorts the congregation, “Fall to your knees and thank God for your eyesight.” Periodically, their adorable-sounding young son Oscar pops up and pipes up, defending what his dad had tried to cute-ify as “bad peepers” and encouraging him through a difficult session reading a bedtime story aloud using Braille.
But “The Country of the Blind” is far from a feel-good family chronicle. Leland rigorously explores the disability’s most troubling corners. Some people, of course, are blinded not congenitally but by terrible accidents: Louis Braille at 3 with a pruning knife. We learn of children hurt by poison oak, a friend’s arrow during archery practice, a mentally ill neighbor’s attack with sulfuric acid.
Mentally and physically, Leland is a restless explorer: traveling to conventions, where the sound of one cane tapping crescendos suddenly into a symphony; interrogating technologists; devoting chapters to how both racism and sexism are aggravated and softened by blindness. (I guess one should cheer that PornHub has offered audio descriptions for its most popular videos?)
Most profoundly, he invites readers to consider whether vision deserves “the privileged place it holds at the top of the hierarchy of the senses.” Covid-19 reminded us of the preciousness, even primacy, of smell and taste. And the early text and images generated by artificial intelligence — those disturbing, perfectly competent but slightly off pictures and paragraphs that are just beginning to flood screens — certainly challenge optic supremacy, as does the resurgence of audio, sexier than movies at the moment (sorry, Barbie).
After Oscar’s tactile guidance through the American Museum of Natural History — his small hand taking the shape of talons to describe an owl diorama — his father writes, “I felt like I’d unlocked a new, airy chamber in my life as a blind person.”
Like that museum, with its vast chambers containing past and future, “The Country of the Blind” is a wonderful cross-disciplinary wander. If on occasion its deluge of information overwhelms, this is where one reviewer’s old cliché about eyes glazing over enters everlasting retirement.
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND: A Memoir at the End of Sight | By Andrew Leland | 368 pp. | Penguin Press | $29
