Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

by Sanford D. Greenberg

  The movie began. There was a dedication: to all the people who died in the Holocaust. Everyone was rapt. You could hear the cells growing on people’s fingernails. One must revere the Holocaust, but since we are so far from it these days, the closest thing we can revere is a movie about it.

  The first part of the movie was noisy, a lot of black-and-white shots of concentration camps and rustling around and horrified prisoners. There was dialogue in German. My wife began reading the subtitles for me. People around us started growing restless, shifting in their seats. Perhaps they were wondering how we could be so insensitive during a movie like this.

  The space about me still felt very thick and warm. We were witnessing history. But “witness” in my case was qualified. Sue kept translating for me. She is tough. She has been in the trenches with me and does not care at all what someone might think of her or me. She was well aware that people were irked by her whispering, but she had no intention of stopping.

  Known for his use of contrast between light and dark, Spielberg chose to do this movie in black and white. He had, in the first part of the film, created some compositions that my wife felt were important to mention at the moment. Or perhaps mention because she is irreverent. And so the more restless people became, the more she was determined to share miscellaneous details about the film’s composition.

  There was a particularly poignant scene, one involving actual gas chambers, and she described the entire terrible moment to me. The people in the theater were dead quiet, unnaturally so. Movies can do this to a crowd; it is the strangest thing.

  “It’s very interesting,” my wife said into my ear. “Really, it’s very interesting. Hold on, hold on—they’re about to turn on, hold on, wait, yes, I think, okay, they’re turning on the gas. They think it’s showers.” The scene was horrifying, and then it was over. That’s when the trouble began.

  A man in front of us turned around. “Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry, but this is too much.” His voice was indignant, filled with conviction. We were staining his movie experience, one of the most important movie experiences of his life. We were disrespecting the audience, the filmmaker, everyone affiliated with the film, not to mention, of course, all the human beings who suffered in the real event being depicted on screen. “Can you please shut up?” he said. My wife began her rejoinder, but he shook his head. “Just shut up,” he hissed, and turned back.

  My wife and I turned toward each other. I could feel the heat from her face; she was about as angry as I have ever known her to be. I am calm-headed because I must be. We just did not know what to say, so we said nothing. People all around were looking at us, affirming what the man had just said. We were baking. On the screen, Jews were being gassed, but that was no longer of paramount importance to Sue and me, or maybe even to the people around us. I thought, it’s just a movie. It’s not the real thing. “I can’t see, you guys,” I wanted to say. But I didn’t.

  I wish there was an area in theaters where blind people could sit in comfort and have their companions tell them the story. But I don’t know of any such theater.

  I could not fully grasp that this man told us to shut up. And I could not believe that everyone had gone along with it. After all, this was just a movie, a for-profit endeavor that was going to enrich some people (the actors about to be gassed, for example).

  The movie continued, but my spirits were crushed. It was a reminder that the only time you can forget about being blind is during sleep. After about ten minutes of total awkwardness, I felt a cramping in my stomach. I knew that feeling. It is emergent, and I knew that if I did not find a men’s room within a few minutes there was going to be a different kind of unpleasantness. I waited, as I have waited my entire life, for a discreet exit, but this night it was not meant to be. I leaned over to Sue and told her I had to go to the bathroom. She was watching the movie, but I could tell that her attention was perfunctory. “Now?” she said. “Oh yes,” I said.

  We both had to get up, Sue leading me by the hand down the row of furious moviegoers. You are not supposed to say or do anything when something about the Holocaust is being presented. But sometimes you have to go to the bathroom. The pressure was intense, almost painful. We brushed by boney knees and fat knees, everyone making noises of disgust at our rudeness.

  We went around the left side of the theater, moved slowly down the stairs, and then we were out the door.

  It was very quiet in the lobby. My wife led me to the men’s room, and from there I was able to continue on my own. I then went out to where my wife was waiting for me.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m perfectly fine. I’m terrific. Never been better. In fact, I feel like a million bucks.”

  “Okay,” she said. She did not mention the cranky man in the movie theater. We headed back toward the theater, and the nervous young man who had shepherded the line said, “You guys left the movie?”

  “Yes,” my wife said. “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “No. But you guys are the first to leave. Would you believe that? People sit for three hours straight. It’s crazy, but they have been doing that since the show opened. I guess it’s supposed to be a very important movie.”

  “Yes,” my wife said.

  The smell of popcorn was all around us, heavy, as if the air itself were chewable. Candy, too.

  “Are you guys going back in?” the boy asked.

  I looked at my wife. I did not see her face, but I knew that she was looking at me. Perhaps there was another option.

  “No,” I said, “we’re not going back in.”

  “We’re not?” said Sue.

  “I guess not,” said the young man, with a smile of empathy.

  “Well,” I said to him. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime,” he said.

  Sometimes my blindness can crush even the people I love most in unexpected ways. There are few people to whom I have been able even to attempt to explain the phenomenon of my fascination with the trumpet, as it necessarily involves something beyond the reach of logical explication. My best friend the artist and singer is one such person. My wife, too. She surprised me on a recent birthday of mine when she flew my brother and sister-in-law in from Rochester, New York, for the occasion. My brother, a couple of years younger than I, is an optometrist—no coincidence. At the birthday party Sue produced a present for me. As I unwrapped it, I felt that it was a piece of luggage, a hard case, its texture rough and durable. We already had nice luggage, but I pretended to be excited. She told me to open the case. I found the two clasps and unhooked them. Inside the case I expected to find some small gift, perhaps a gadget for travel. Instead, what I touched was the bell of a trumpet.

  I did not remove the instrument but instead ran my fingers along the tapers of its throat. I lifted it out and handled the mouthpiece. The brass felt cold, and the instrument seemed perfect, as in fact it was. Sue had purchased a Bach Stradivarius, an instrument so finely crafted that for anyone but a master to play it would be almost obscene, the way one would not play catch with a baseball signed by Lou Gehrig or Babe Ruth. It is an instrument so well balanced that only a professional would be able to appreciate it fully. In fact, she had asked the principal trumpeter in the National Symphony Orchestra which instrument was the very best. He told her, and she got one for me.

  I removed the trumpet, slowly, from the velvet around it—even the housing in the case was so well made that I could practically hear a pop as I freed the instrument. As I ran my fingers around the rim of the bell, although no one else mentioned hearing it, a light tone began to sound, the way a good crystal wineglass would ring if one were to slide a dampened finger around its rim. I did not say it (I didn’t say anything at all, actually), but I thought, and would think later, that this would be sufficient, that I would never need to play it—my running my fingers around the rim, the sound resonating at a pitch that only I seemed able to hear, would be sufficient.

  Then I hea
rd the instrument itself singing, without my stroking it, as if in its very existence it was required to make music. Strange. I sensed that the others seated around me were still hearing nothing. I did not know whether I should tell them. Then I thought, no, I had better not. This feeling—the wanting to tell someone something and not being able to—is not uncommon for me. They would have laughed, even though we were in my own home. Company was all around, yet here I was holding an instrument that was making music on its own, as if it were inclined to do so. I withhold these kinds of secrets from people—the secret life of the blind.

  I fitted the mouthpiece into the instrument and put my lips to it. I could hear the smiles of the people at the party, lips pulling back against teeth and gums. My wife told me to play something. As I put the instrument to my lips I remembered: embouchure. But my brother, a sweet man, said softly that I had better not try to play the instrument. “It’s the pressure,” he said. The pressure from playing the instrument could be painful for my eyes. It is an aspect of glaucoma. To play a wind instrument might cause blood vessels in my eyes to pop. My wife left the room; I found out later she was in tears.

  Yes, it was sad, very sad. I thanked her nonetheless, deeply, sincerely.

  But later that night, when the other guests were gone and she and my brother and sister-in-law were asleep, I found my way to my study, where I had placed the trumpet. Secretly, I worried that I would not be able to find it and would have to ask for help. It was in its case, right on my desk. As I opened it, the clasps snapping back seemed awfully loud. I took out the trumpet, covetously. It was not that I intended to play it, although I did insert the mouthpiece and put the instrument up to my mouth again, like kissing it. Then I just held it against my chest. I liked the heft of it. I liked the way it felt through the fabric of my nightshirt. I ran my finger around the rim of the bell again. And again a sound: not just a tone, but music and, with music, joy—pure joy, the sort of joy that is also a prayer. I think that in writing these remembrances, prayer has been my companion all along.

  18

  My Blindness Balance

  Sheet: Assets

  Happily, balance sheets feature two opposing sets of figures: debits and assets. I’m rich in the latter.

  In spite of the abuses I have suffered, both emotional and physical, I am healthy.

  Not seeing people’s facial expressions can be a good thing. The words spoken to me by the ugliest, most disfigured, most poorly dressed person imaginable may come to me with a weight equal to those from the most splendid face and physique. I do not judge a person on looks because I cannot. For me, the tone of voice and the content of the speech are what matter.

  While I can’t see, per se, I do have an elevated sense of place, of objects around me—I can feel their distance as clearly as if I could see them. For example, when I play basketball, it is easy for me to dodge a defender, to launch an accurate shot from the top of the key, and slide through big men toward the hoop. I sense the distance of people from me in waves. (I should add this capacity has its limits. Bill Bradley—the one-time Princeton all-American and former New York Knick, All-Pro, NBA champ, and US senator—humors me as he would anyone in our rare games; then when the game gets tight, Bill turns up the heat, clamps down on me, and scores almost at will.)

  Because I was blessedly gifted with sight until my junior year in college, I have stored mental images of the world upon which I can still draw: great art and architecture, colors and shapes, and the faces of my old friends, my family, and my wife. My manic prowling among museums and art galleries in New York seems in retrospect like the activity of a squirrel preparing for winter. To this day, I collect art, visiting galleries often with Jerry Speyer, just as we did back in our undergraduate days, or with an art consultant who acts as my eyes. From learning at Columbia how to identify entire drawings from a single line or section, I can in a similar way put together a work of art or an entire room.

  Sometimes I even commission work. Some years back, I asked Frank Stella to turn the prototype of the speech-compression machine I had invented into a piece of art. The machine had helped launch my business career, and I wanted to honor it. Frank thought about my request for six months and worked on the project far longer than that before he presented me with a soaring metallic structure with my prototype right at its heart. I can’t see the sculpture, of course, but I can feel it, even sense it, and I know exactly what it looks like—although that might not be exactly what it looks like at all.

  If not for my blindness, I would never have made deep friendships with many of those who have helped me, from my readers to my close college friends to my business colleagues. Each has been an individual light in my life.

  I have been all over the world. What I have experienced of it is, on balance, more good than bad. In all those places, no one has lifted my wallet or kidnapped me for ransom.

  I’ve had to learn how to live with fear and risk.

  Sue earned a master’s in special education and an MBA in finance. Her White House work during the Clinton years has been a blessing to us both. Would she have done all that if I had not gone blind? Who knows?

  I am not aware of recent signs of aging in other people. I know my wife is slightly younger than I am, but I see her ageless and beautiful.

  My family is healthy and, I believe, happy.

  Having to develop other ways to see the world has benefited me in multiple ways. One I have mentioned often in these pages is the imagination, a twin of scholarly thought. Imagination seems to me more a generalized mental activity than a path to a clear-cut end result. I can say only from personal experience that memory and imagination, in my darkened life, percolating within the mind, often blend indistinguishably. For better or worse, I am perforce prone to reflection. I’ve had to be my own guru on the road to self-knowledge, and to slowness, and maybe ultimately to serenity—which I believe cannot be achieved by force of will alone.

  I happily admit that I have a vivid imagination that often takes me into the realm of fantasy. Reality is rich, but fantasy makes life richer and often fosters creativity. I love imagining different scenarios for my own life, and this in turn has made me try to see things from other people’s perspectives.

  Saint-Exupéry observed, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” And, in Helen Keller’s words, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” I am told by an old expert on Japan that there is an appreciation in that country for places and things that are off limits to the public, including great national treasures within certain temple precincts. I take that to be a tribute to the special role played by imagination: how much richer those places and objects may become to us when we know of them, yet cannot confront them and “check them off.”

  For sighted people, the consciousness is normally dominated by the constant stream of visual perceptions. Sounds run a distant second to the role of visual distraction. The visual stream is like having the television on all day; the eye is drawn constantly toward the screen. Since I don’t have that, you might think that I would be locked within my mind. But that’s not the case. My imagination allows for rich engagement, not just in an imaginary world but in the real one.

  I’m not sure this counts as an unblemished asset, but an odd side effect of being sightless has to do with confidences. My local community, Washington, is a town full of secrets, or supposed secrets. People tell me their secrets the way you might tell a bartender something that is on your mind. Sometimes very personal secrets, as at a confessional—so perhaps in this way I am like the priest who is unable to see the penitent but is there to grant absolution.

  Often, the secrets I hear are silly or trivial. Sometimes, however, they are not. Indeed, you would probably find it hard to believe what I hear in confidence. (Of course, I can’t tell you.) Cabinet members, senators, heads of federal agencies, heads of educational institutions, old H
ollywood icons, Supreme Court justices, captains of industry and finance—leaning close to me, out of the sides of their mouths, they confess all sorts of things. Mistakes. Transgressions. Bypasses that should not have been taken. Things overlooked that should not have been overlooked. Evidence uncovered that should not have been uncovered. Sometimes they want to get it off their chests, and they know I am discreet. I could have ruined lives. My word, or my ear, it seems, is good—and all the better because I have no eyes. As they say, go figure.

  Powerful people have told me secrets about their lives, but sometimes that is nearly all I know about them. The rest of their lives is a mystery, and so there would be no point in revealing the little I know. Sometimes I wonder what is the correct amount of my own life to disclose to people and whether everything would be better if I disclosed a little more. Or would it be better if I disclosed less?

  Something special about us blind people—and this, I have come to realize is an unqualified asset—is that we do not see horizons. It is a subtle thing, but not insignificant. I can testify that there are no longer any horizons in my own life. Since I left the hospital in Detroit, I have not perceived any of the everyday horizons that sighted people experience. My not seeing topological horizons might seem like something Delphic or metaphorical. It is not. Horizons are essentially a function of spatial perceptions, and only tangentially (pun intended) an aspect of experience.

  We blind people cannot go toward a horizon, nor can we feel the limitation of space suggested by a horizon. We do not wonder what is beyond the horizon because we do not have horizons. For us, horizons just do not exist. No such thing. Walls and the like do exist for us, for example, when we physically encounter them. But except for echoes when the walls are very near, I do not establish a mental environment hemmed in by walls, either. I have developed a way to approximate the layout of a room, but with a diminished sense of enclosure. It’s subtle.