I remembered a moment when I was five. Shortly after my father’s death, a tall, husky bearded rabbi wearing a skullcap crouched before me. He took my hand and placed it on the large, round, shiny crystal of the leather-strapped watch encircling his thick wrist. “Look at the hand as it moves past each second,” he said. “Once past, each second is gone. It will never return again.” Those words now returned to me with staggering force. Time lost and opportunities squandered: further emotional pain.
I had seen my widowed mother’s tribulations, particularly in my youngest years—her tireless efforts to care for her ailing mother and to protect her children. She rose early to take us to school, caressed us tenderly, and went off to labor at the Curtiss-Wright aircraft factory, then performed countless household chores. But how often did I sit down, look into her eyes, and ask her how her day was, much less ask her about her deepest cares? How seldom had I, even when circumstances became brighter for us, sat down and looked at her? Now it was too late. The seconds had gone, never to return, just as the rabbi had warned. I had missed too many opportunities.
I still cannot explain to my own satisfaction why, at this awful juncture, it was this loss of time that sprang initially to my mind. But it did, and with great force. I suppose the mind, below the level of consciousness, has its own operational logic. A few months earlier, in physics class, we had discussed energy and light, mass and acceleration. Now my own light was gone. The physics formulae were all wrong: for me, light was no longer energy but had become time. I had no more time. It seemed to me that my problem was not about darkness or about blindness but about the loss of seconds.
Even though the metal pads had been removed, I became conscious of something like a dark-gray, impenetrable metal door on my eyes. From within I could “see” that door, because there was something on it that attracted my notice. There, dancing before me, were a multitude of patterns and configurations. Some of the ephemeral little figures and patterns were gray. Others were black or white. I shook my head in an attempt to clear them.
Those initial postoperative images did dissipate after a while, but they had pointed me toward a new way of perceiving the world. I had in effect begun the process of understanding that in my consciousness I would be able to construct images of the faces of the people with whom I spoke—the pigment of their skin, the shape of their eyes, noses, mouths—and the layout of a room, its depths, texture, and volume; and images of nature—the sky, the shapes of the clouds, the sunset. Thus, I vaguely sensed even in those early moments without eyesight that I might become able to view things without the contamination of the ugly.
Despite this discovery, I was not ready to be blind. Who would be? So began my slide.
They brought me food, but I would not eat. As a precaution, they cleaned out my medicine cabinet—took my razor and blades and left the bathroom barren. That first night, I took the sleeping pill I had been given and went to sleep. My restless dreams, more like nightmares, were punctuated by the recurring image of that blind beggar in the market in Buffalo a dozen years earlier. He was laughing at me, his head and chest thrown back, his unseeing eyes facing the sky. Dr. Sugar’s words—“Well, son, you are going to be blind tomorrow”—repeated themselves over and over.
Those images and memories were soon replaced by a new one that was also to repeat itself often in my dreams during those early weeks: a large white placard with black letters reading “IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE.” Was some covert logic making connections deep in my mind? The message was a brave yet futile denial but one that was later to be transposed into a determination to be blind on my own terms. That imperative, while mad, turned out not to be futile.
The following day the hospital’s rabbi, Rabbi Bakst—a kind, humble man—came to tell me about King Solomon’s call for every jeweler in the land to bring forth the most precious ring. Despite seeing rings encrusted with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds, Solomon selected a plain gold band engraved with the Hebrew letters gimel, zayin, and yud—Gam zeh ya’avor—“This too shall pass.” The inspirational story had little of its intended effect on me.
Unannounced, a childhood friend, Sandy Hoffman, a junior at the University of Michigan, barreled through the door of my room. Jovial and loquacious, he had driven to Detroit to visit me. His sprawling arms and large hands had often challenged me in basketball. He halted inside the door, obviously taken aback. I sensed his usually optimistic bearing quickly receding. My mother moved to greet him, and he flung his arms around her. She was extremely fond of him, often referring to him as her third son. But as I lay prone, hair disheveled, eyes moist with medication staring pointlessly upward, I extended no greeting to my friend. He moved slowly toward me, gently raised my bare right forearm, and placed it against his chest. At first he did not speak, but then, as though nothing had happened since I had seen him the previous fall, he blurted out, “How are you?” I did not respond.
“When am I going to whip you in basketball?”
Lacking animation, I said, “Anytime you want.” I sat up.
“Please don’t pay any attention to my jabbering,” he said. “It’s just my teeth chattering from the cold—reminds me of the good old days in Buffalo, when we froze our asses off.” He immediately tried to withdraw those words, recognizing that “the good old days,” even
