Sandy’s reflections have a main theme. Though robbed of his sight (owing to the repeated misdiagnosis of an ophthalmologist in his hometown), he considers himself “the luckiest man in the world.” How can that be, the reader, early on, is likely to ask. Sandy writes of his handholds: his family, heritage, friends, education at Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford; his White House Fellowship, which fostered collegial relationships with persons of importance in government, commerce, and the arts; his service on the National Science Board and numerous other governing bodies; his three children and now four grandchildren; and, above all else, his partnership in life with Sue, whose love and support sustain him in all things.
Yet something more, he relates, accounts for his good life, something sighted people cannot possess with the same intensity. Sandy calls it his “informed life within the mind,” a mind in which thoughts proliferate and assemble “undisturbed by the constant flow of visual sense images.” That special facility has helped him to experience the joys of being alive and to contribute abundantly to the well-being of others.
From a hospital bed in Detroit in February 1961, his sightless eyes moist with medication, Sanford D. Greenberg “made a deal with God.” If the Lord got him “out of this hole,” Sandy vowed, he would do all he could “to prevent others from going through grief like this in the future.” He has carried through on that promise, directing prodigious energy to the development of technology for optic-nerve regeneration. To the same end, his steady hand is at the helm of the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute. These endeavors and multiple other pro bono initiatives are cause for the “Big Party” Sandy hosts in a dreamspiel he imagines and records with élan in a chapter of this book.
Sandy will play the fine trumpet Sue gave him, and his Columbia College classmate and lifelong buddy Arthur Garfunkel will sing. An ancient Greek chorus will chant and carry on. Everybody who is anybody will be there, including saints, sinners, and lawgivers, scientists and statesmen, philosophers and artists, entertainers and captains of commerce. My husband and I, careful readers will note, are enjoying the party. In my own extension of Sandy’s dream, I have my choice of people to toast: Eleanor Roosevelt, George Gershwin, Ella Fitzgerald, and other favorites by the score. Bypassing the luminaries in the huge room, I raise my glass to Sanford D. Greenberg, who chose life in all its vibrancy. L’chaim, Sandy, to you and to Sue. You have presented a spectacular show. May there be encores galore.
—Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Introduction
Even this we will be pleased to recall—all God’s gifts of life, shining from birth to death. Chai—to life! To all of it. To blindness and exaltation.
I knew him first on the steps of Hamilton Hall. We were coming out of our humanities class at Columbia College. It was 1959. I had seen him playing basketball that year—a powerful center, a bull. Now coming out of Professor Goethal’s class, the powerful man was beside me, shoulder to shoulder, six feet two. I felt his duality, tender and mighty. He spoke with a gentle resonance. We had just been stirred by Achilles, star of The Iliad. Could such arête, such heroic dimension, relate to our future? He loved that I treated all of life as precious. I stopped to glory in the beauty of light as it lit up a patch of green, green grass. The nation wasn’t funky yet. Punk had not been born. It was love of the moment to moment. We were Appreciators. Destiny sketched, character exchanged, we cast our fate as roommates.
This was our town, this friendship of ours. We are the ones who can’t look at everything hard enough. What is it all but luminous? In tiniest increments, in our junior year, glaucoma set in. So I read to him. It was the natural thing to do. Follow the heart through even this. Tears blur the vision, sweet indecision to be or curl up back in the womb. We had our room, “four-o-six,” we prayed at the window, your hair was shiny brown.
To slip from the shore and swim in the widening stream of our history once more starlit in the mystery of the mutual love we store against the night…
The man behind the pen who writes this book is a Man. I was so deeply touched to read Sandy’s treatment of me in this magnificent book. I blush to find myself within his dimension. My friend is my gold standard of decency. I try to be his cantor, the tallis that embraces him.
—Art Garfunkel
PART 1
Day
& Night
1
Stranger on a Train
I boarded the train and put my suitcase in front of me. It was freezing in the city. I felt cold air wafting into the car like a ghostly presence and pulled my jacket tight around myself. A horn blew, and the train pulled out smoothly, as if on air. It would be an eight-hour ride from New York north to Albany, then west to Syracuse and Rochester, and finally on to Buffalo at the eastern end of Lake Erie.
My mind turned in on itself. A door had closed between my present and my future—a future that until recently had been laid out rather clearly. It was still daytime, but for me it was actually dark, my vision visited by clouds and what looked like swirling snow. This was deeply troubling: my vision still had not come back to normal, as it had done fairly promptly in the past months. I held the suitcase up in front of me like a shield. I used to scoop my little sister into that suitcase. Silently, I began to cry.
A man
