Far-fetched? Maybe, but I can assure you that it is a functioning element in my mentality. If you are sighted, spend a week or so blindfolded, and let me know if it still seems far-fetched. After losing the vision of my eyes, I crafted a personal vision for my new life. I had to. In losing horizons, I could feel boundaries beginning to lose much of their hold over me. I began to feel free again, albeit in a new and unexpected way. My boundaries began opening up into a beautiful and widening circle of friends and family.
Maybe that’s why the great humanitarian Michael Bloomberg once said, “Sandy has aspiration, hope, a role for all of us.” I can’t help it: I have no way of limiting what I imagine.
A reporter from the German Financial Times once quoted me as having said, “In the dark I am able to think about what kind of enterprises I want to create,” while other people are usually preoccupied by the often trivial things they see around themselves.
There is joy to be experienced from working with complex ideas. Joy.
Ideas can be beautiful in and of themselves, as beautiful in their way as the experience of listening to the “Kol Nidre” or a Bach cantata. Physicists find beauty in a mathematical proof or clever experimental validation of some hypothesis. To experience the beauty of an idea is to experience joy.
The years from my first steps through the gates of Columbia, to graduate study, and on to the White House and beyond were my glory days of reveling in ideas. But there is no end to experiencing the joy of discovering and working with new ideas. Learning gives me a sensation of adding light to the darkness. It’s only a metaphor—there are no actual flashes—but I do sometimes have a sense of a burst of light.
But I must once more acknowledge this: Acquiring and using intellectual capital, as I did, required determination, the real-world sort of determination and endurance that I saw in my father Carl’s toil in the junkyard. It took many years of driven exercise to narrow and intensify a focus on a life within my mind. It was not something implanted whole in my brain at birth, nor was it a sudden flash of insight. It also had to be nourished constantly. It was a long road I had to take, but I have loved it. That’s the reality of my blind life.
So on balance—debits subtracted from assets because this is, after all, a balance sheet? On balance, I consider myself the luckiest man in the world. I picked up that line from Lou Gehrig’s famous farewell speech at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, two years before his death at age thirty-seven of ALS: “For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Same here, Lou.
19
Speak, Memory
Just as high blood pressure can cause the human heart to enlarge, blindness did the same to my memory. I have a very good one. My mind became an archive, and I live my days, for the most part, somewhere in the stacks. That said, I wasn’t certain if the central role of memory in the life of the blind qualifies as an asset or a debit—bad old times as well as the good are ever with me—so I opted to give the subject a short chapter of its own. The title, by the way, is borrowed from Vladimir Nabokov’s elegant autobiography of the same name. My memory speaks all the time.
A few years ago Sue and I decided to take a trip to Buffalo to revisit our roots. Our motives for going back after so many years of living in Washington were different, I suspect, but I did not say so. Sue had left the night before to catch up with some twenty of her old girlfriends from Bennett High School; I met up with her in the city the following day.
I asked our hosts, old neighborhood friends, if we could visit my old home on Butler Avenue. They were a little hesitant. It wasn’t a nice area when I’d grown up there, they said, and it had gotten worse. It would look strange, four people, driving around in an expensive car in what had become an impoverished community. But it was daytime.
When we got on Humboldt Parkway, I started to point out where everyone had lived. I had a very clear image in my head of what everything looked like. I knew where our synagogue was, where Dr. Mortson’s office had been. I wanted it all to be very clean and neat and orderly and not to think about those visits with Dr. Mortson.
We stopped at 163 Butler. The houses along here were a hundred years old, and in front of them were cement blocks holding up the front stairs. It was a beautiful day, warm and dry. Sue was chatting with our friends.
I put my hand on one of the cement blocks. It was rough. It had been some time since I’d felt something so hard and grainy, so raw. I tried to make my way up to the threshold of the door, but I realized someone would have to help me. I ended up just standing there, Sue and the others still talking.
I pictured playing football on summer evenings with Joel. I thought of the bugs floating up to the lampposts. I thought of my mother and
