Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

by Sanford D. Greenberg

  Schopenhauer wrote, “Every man takes the limit of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” With no horizons and no visual sensations to compete with and anchor my thoughts, I don’t have the same sense of boundaries shared by people impaired with sight. Sometimes this has to do with the physical world in front of me; sometimes I experience it as a vague border between the dream state and the waking state.

  I also lack perspective. Not the sort that is supposed to inform judgment and decision making, I hope, but the kind that concerns visual artists. The sort of perspective that Professor Schnorrenberg once brought up at the university in discussing the innovations of the Renaissance painters: the concept of the vanishing point. Aside from visual memories from before I lost my eyesight—a blessing the magnitude of which I cannot express—I know no vanishing points. My image of the topographical world can cram in distant things without their having to be all squeezed together, as they would in perspective. I am a functional surrealist.

  The duality of boundaries for me as a blind person is another element of my bent mentality. As I sit in a room, for instance, my maximum boundary of safety and freedom from fear of movement is…zero. The zone of pure safety stops at my skin. That was the safe zone I faced back in Buffalo after the Detroit operation. But the flip side of having no safe space is that I also see no dangers. That may sound odd, but when I sit in a room that has no boundaries—in other words every room—the only thing out there is the entire universe. It is either completely filled with danger, or it has none at all. It’s my existential choice.

  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 grandmother cooking, speaking in Yiddish. What did they kibitz about when we weren’t around? I could see blind old Will Ludwig looming in front of his house, watching the kids play in the street. I thought of my father, Albert. This is where his coffin had lain—inside, a few feet from where I was standing. I could feel the smoothness of the coffin, the coolness of it. And the wood of the floor, and its smell, something homey and warm.

  Several of the neighborhood people were gathering around us. We must have seemed like aliens to them. A little girl went up to Sue, who explained that I had once lived in this house.

  “He did?” she said, her voice rising, not believing that this man had lived in her home.

  “Do you want to meet him?” Sue asked.

  The little girl came over to me. She couldn’t have been any older than ten. I put my hand out for her to shake. I told her my name and she told me hers. Her hand, though tiny, was not a young child’s hand. It was dry and remarkably coarse.

  The following day we decided to go back to Crystal Beach, a place that was as close to paradise as I could imagine when I was a little boy. Much of what I recalled had changed or been shut down. The amusement park, for example, which we’d never been able to afford, had closed years ago. The property was covered with condos.

  Still, I felt like I was no longer in the present but back in the forties. I had a very clear image of a dance hall that had stood on the rise of the beach, off to the side, where only adults were allowed to go. It was a mysterious place, wonderful. At night, my mother and father would go there, and although I was too young to really consider romance, I did think of my parents dancing. Ma
ybe they would kiss, maybe not—I didn’t know, but we’d look over at the hall, always in the dark, the doorway and the windows glowing gold in the night.

  The reinvention of the place in my head was different, of course, than what had actually happened. At times, in my memory, I was set apart from my family. I was standing on the wide cement pier, the water turbulent, sloshing against the pilings. My mother and Joel were walking past me, and then they would stop and look at me. They appeared, in my memory, like any regular mother and son. Only I wasn’t with them. And when they stopped to look at me, this little boy, standing by the pier, they wouldn’t necessarily say anything. It was as if they were sort of asking me if I wanted to join them.

  I think some of the nostalgia of being there rubbed off on Sue, who said she wanted to visit the old cottage that her parents had rented in the summers. It didn’t really matter to us that much of the beach was now a gated community, that things were not precisely as we remembered them.

  Near the end of the trip, we visited the cemetery where my family is buried. The weather had darkened a bit. We found the spot, and I rested my hand on my mother’s gravestone. It was weathered, but there was still a grit to it, a toughness, something enduring about it, which I felt was appropriate. The grass was soft, and so was the air. I thought about what these people, who had had hard lives, would think about me and the kind of life I had led. Their judgment was massively important to me. I felt that they would have been proud of me. But I sensed no response. But (of course!) the response would have to come from inside myself. I lingered a little while, and then we left.

  Ultimately, on that weekend of memory and retrospection, there were a few accompanying feelings of sadness. But there were also rich images of the times Sue and I spent together. I thought about Sue, sixteen years old, coming up out of the water, me watching her from the sand. I thought about how curvy she was, and beautiful, her hair wet as she tucked it behind her neck. She was young and lacking self-consciousness. This beautiful girl was mine and I was hers, and there was the possibility that she would remain so. That is something to which I still cling, an innocent amazement that she is mine.

  One last memory: of standing alone on a dock on the shore of Lake Erie decades ago, near my boyhood home. I throw a stone into the water, and as I watch the ripples extending outward from the point of impact, I become aware of an older me standing nearby, watching. Not just that, but my mother and brother, too. A 3-D memory, as it were—a little bend in the time-space continuum.

  I should be too old to engage in such fantasy. Yet I shamelessly admit that I do—all the time. Fantasy will save you if you let it. You are always encouraged to be a proper grown-up, but if you succumb to that pressure (I never did, occasional appearances aside), you will miss something important, the magic of daily living. You will miss the magnificent, gargantuan essence—the beauty and the joy—that can be uncovered within all the things we encounter on any day. A day when one steps out into fresh air after a week in the hospital; a day one might be walking with his wife on vacation, dancing at a party amongst friends and relatives—some alive, some from the past; or a day at the edge of a dock, idly throwing a stone, waiting for something extraordinary to happen.

  20

  No Man Is an Island

  When I was growing up in Buffalo, someone told me that “the longest way around is the shortest way home.” That bit of folk wisdom has turned out to reflect much of my life. It took me a long time to realize that many of the answers about how I came back to life after I lost my sight lie outside myself. Despite my seeming bravado in facing down the social worker and other well-meaning people, I am not independent. I cannot be. It’s not all about me, and it never was.

  My story is largely one of dependence. Like many of us, I have been a taker. When I needed to, I took and took. And I’m not ashamed to admit it. In a larger sense, I was what the Internal Revenue Service refers to as a dependent. That status has helped me realize something. No one is a self-made man.

  Yes, I have shown determination throughout my life as a blind person, but here is my secret formula:

  Without the support and love from so many people in my life, above all my wife and my family…without the close friendships with which I have been blessed…without the kindness so many people have spontaneously shown…without the oxygen of freedom and rule of law that the United States gave my family…without the education that in my darkness gave me material to help sustain my mind…without the example of great men and women in my life and in history… I am convinced that I would have lain where I fell.

  Time and again, in this long journey up from that Detroit hospital bed I have depended on the sheer example of many people, both living and not. Selecting superior people and following the examples they set may (and probably will) change your life for the better. The choice comes at absolutely no charge to you, so there is no reason to choose any but from the top shelf—the best. If others of mankind—individuals or entire communities—have attained grace and produced lasting achievements, why not take guidance from their paths? It is a question of what we want ourselves to grow to be.

  One example I have followed (or tried to) goes back to my days at Columbia University, not only as an undergraduate but later as an MBA candidate. Benjamin Graham, author of The Intelligent Investor (1949) and a fabulously successful investor himself, was a professor at Columbia and an inspiration for Warren Buffett, who studied under him as a graduate business student and then went to work for his investment firm.

  Graham was an adherent of “value” investing, as contrasted with harried speculation and quick-as-a-flick profit taking. I believe this approach (which has also been Buffett’s) was a cultural inheritance of the Great Depression, but Graham’s principles were also consonant with the general tenor of Eisenhower’s America—which was a big part of my own cultural inheritance. Sensitivity to society at large and its needs, not just a monomaniacal drive for profits at any cost, was reflected in the stance of many of the immediate postwar business leaders—and continued to prevail in the lecture halls of Columbia’s business school for years after Graham departed the faculty in 1955. That is where I learned about value and finance, but finance of a character that fit me well. Its influence has enabled me to build my career in business unaccompanied by any lingering shame about exploitation.

  To my surprise, then, what I subsequently encountered through friends and associates in Washington in 1966 and 1967 was quite a different kettle of fish. Unorthodox approaches to business were in the air. I made new acquaintances who were innovative business doers of a mind-set quite different from the supposedly ideal corporate leaders of the business-school world.

  Tom Watson, for example—not the splendid golfer but the entrepreneurial-minded head of IBM. Tom gave me many ideas about what it really meant to be in business and finance and to build a company. He was especially emphatic on the importance of investing in research and development. Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard fame, a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee with which I was associated as a White House Fellow, also became a friend and contributed even more to my understanding of the emerging entrepreneurial ways of American business. Tellingly, all these friends and guides were avid devotees of technology. And yet the business school had been teaching none of what I was now learning in Washington!

  I have been blessed and sustained by so many friends across such a broad field of endeavor that I find it hard to sort through them in any way accessible to readers. But David Rockefeller deserves a pedestal of his own. David was a member of the board of overseers at Harvard when I first came somewhat within his orbit. He was always interested in the young scholars at the university. He had been asked by President Johnson to provide private-sector funding for a new “White House Fellows” program, which he did. David was appointed chairman of the first Commission on White House Fellowships. Former secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon mentored me in the program and for many years thereafter, as did
John Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

  But David continued to have a large place in my life. Ever since meeting him, he provided me with informal, un-self-conscious tutorials in politics, finance (the two of us acting in concert at times), art, and philanthropy. And he showed an openness of spirit you might not expect in such an Olympian figure in finance and society, generously widening his friendship with me to embrace others in my circle, such as Jerry Speyer.

  David was also instrumental in my becoming a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the board of the National Committee on US-China Relations. In the 1970s, during the early days when Communist China “opened up” to ordinary diplomatic contact with the United States, I was asked to host some of the first wave of Chinese diplomats in our Watergate home. This was an important period of broadening boundaries for the Chinese government and for us. I learned from my experience with those men how talking with each other across borders can lessen ignorance and fear of the unknown.

  I also saw in David, to mention one more quality, an amazing grace under pressure. Despite his great wealth and influence, David had experienced severe pressure as well as reverses, yet had not hesitated to turn to others simply and unpretentiously for help and support. He had a highly developed sense of honor, which I have found worth emulating, and he respected all manner of people, high and not so high. I have tried to absorb his ability to carry himself with dignity but at the same time modestly. And here is a man who could throw his weight around almost without limit. (I’ll add here that David was one of the people who urged me to share my experiences, in the belief that to do so might help others.)