EINSTEIN once said, ‘All I want to do is study light.’ One can see why, for in the end everything comes down to light. And the sight to see the light. And the will to use the sight. In other words, the will to look.
The late John O’Donohue once wrote of ‘those who are physically blind: they have lived all their lives in a moonscape of darkness. They have never seen a wave, a stone, a star, a flower, the sky, or the face of another human being.’[i] It is hard for us with vision to imagine how terrible it must be to have no real notion of such things, never having seen them.
But it is even harder to imagine what it must be like to be told one will never see such things again. That one is going blind. Yet it happens every day to thousands throughout the world.
I would prefer to die.
What are the things I would miss, were I to go blind? Well, those things John O’Donohue mentions – waves, stones, stars, flowers, faces. But what else? Where to begin? I would miss those beams of light that slant down from a sky at evening, and look like a holy picture [263]. I would miss light filtering through leaves in spring. Or the way a girl’s blond hair lights up when sunlight drives through it [10]. (Remember Marilyn Monroe?)
Or the colours on a CD when the light plays on its surface. Or those same colours in an oil spill on a wet road. Or in a rainbow. Or the undulating light pattern that my glass of beer throws on a sunlit café table. Or the light peeping in at morn through my bedroom curtains.
Or a Celtic high cross etched against a sky [11]. Or the slow sparkle on roadstead or harbour as the sun inches westwards [810]. Or Yeats’s long-legged fly upon a stream, walking on the water [265]. Or that golden pathway to the sun as it sets in the Atlantic. These I have loved. And so much more.
In other words, what I would miss is light. Scientists tell us it is the source of our very existence: perhaps that is why it is the source of joy for all of us.
All of us? John O’Donohoe finishes the passage quoted above with the terrible words: ‘Yet there are others with perfect vision who are absolutely blind.’ #
[i] O’Donohue, John. Anam Cara. London: Bantam Press, 1997. Page 88.