Aside from the need for readers and some study notes I could make in very large, thick black letters using the shred of sight left to me (which would be lost all too soon), I began to rely on my tape recorder—one of my new survival tools. Since the time my mother and Sue began reading books aloud to me, I had had only their voices as sources of information. By the beginning of summer, that process frustrated me. It was an enormous imposition on them and served as well to make my dependence virtually complete. Those feelings gnawed at me. I had resisted asking for a tape recorder because of the financial burden it would place on my parents, but I finally summoned up the courage to ask, and they responded by purchasing a reel-to-reel machine.
In those days, there were no cassette or microcassette tape recorders to slip into the side of a book bag, let alone digital recorders the size of one’s little finger. The model I got was typical: two feet in length, one and a half feet in depth, and one foot in height. When its top was opened, another two feet by one and one-half feet was added to any surface. The thing was so heavy and cumbersome that I had to use both hands to move it, and of course when I got back to college for my senior year, I had to haul it around campus to lectures and classes. The recorder was, nevertheless, a crucial step in advancing my education. It provided me with a degree of intellectual independence for the first time since the onset of blindness.
Like the voices of my readers, the voices on the tapes I made all sounded the same to me. I heard those voices in my sleep—when I did sleep, which was only four hours a night. In my dreams, there was now the hum and winding noise of the tape recorder, the tape rolling between the magnetic heads, sometimes getting caught, and the snap of the auto-off switch, each snap sounding like a gunshot, my auditory system having become so highly sensitized.
I set outrageously ambitious deadlines for myself. All senior year I worked like that—early morning to past midnight, single-mindedly attacking my work schedule for that day until full completion—and all year there were those bad dreams. Even while awake, I would hear the crack of a door, the pop of a bottle cap, and think that I had fallen asleep while listening to the tape recorder. Then there was the accompanying panic that the very minutes I might have missed were going to set me back, and lead to…what? To downfall and doom. Determination does not rule out waves of self-doubt and pessimism. When you are blind and in the Big City, things can go south in a New York second.
One Saturday in the fall, I went to a football game with a bunch of my friends. It was probably one of those good old Ivy League games—maybe Columbia-Princeton. Everything was fine for the first quarter. We were all having a grand time. Then someone had to go get a hot dog or use the restroom, so we all had to stand up. At that point, a person behind us accidentally (I have to believe it was accidental) knocked into me, and I got pushed forward a little bit. I reached out to steady myself on the back of the person sitting in front of me. But the person who had been there was gone. I toppled over the bleachers for a row or two. No broken bones, but I did need stitches—the first of many, many such times—and I felt like such a fool.
Amid the chaos of my early efforts to adjust, I had already begun thinking about the future beyond my senior year. The prospects looked unpromising. I assumed that the better graduate schools, especially the law schools, would not readily accept anyone who might appear in the slightest way unable to deal with their bloated reading lists. I traveled up to Harvard to talk with the dean of the law school—a humorless giant of a man with a wide mouth and fat cheeks, I was told—about my prospects for law school. That he even took my appointment was surprising. I asked him, given my presumed limitation, what advice he might have for me. He replied that I should continue on my course of study but that it would not lead directly to the law at this time. At least he softened the blow with “at this time.” I accepted his advice.
Back at Columbia, I began to apply instead to PhD programs in government studies and international affairs. Graduate study at Harvard was still on my mind. I crossed the esplanade to meet with Samuel P. Huntington, my international-relations professor, who would soon be leaving Columbia to join the Harvard faculty.
After our meeting, I descended the campus steps and, upon reaching the edge of the famous statue of Alma Mater, placed my foot too far in front of a step. Alma Mater, her imposing bronze body couched on a square of concrete, presumably continued staring into the distance as I crashed down the steps in front of her. My pants were torn, my sport coat and shirt covered in blood, my head bruised. I got up, happy that at least no one seemed to have seen me and rushed over to help, and hobbled back to my room.
I decided to hedge my bets and apply to as many graduate schools as I could manage: Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Wisconsin, Chicago, and Cornell. Arthur helped me with the application process, as did Sue. We worked feverishly to meet the deadlines, and we decided to inform the schools straight out
