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March 21 - March 30, 2024
Making music is like a prescription for a disease that cannot be cured but whose symptoms can be alleviated. Music did that for me back then, and still does.
Hermann Hesse may have gotten close to it: “God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to a new life.” The awakening, though, was brutally hard.
“But, Sanford, you have already lived a fine life, and I think yours will be a long life. No, you won’t see the sun, but the fire in you will lead you to achievements that others can only dream about.” That flowery rhetoric was pure Arthur, right out of late nights at the V&T Pizzeria.
In taking, the receiver offers an opportunity for the giver to give. The giver is a receiver, and the receiver a giver. I owe my life to that balance.
I have come to realize that I had an endless hunger for ideas. Living an informed life within the mind, a mind in which thoughts proliferate and assemble, requires a steady diet of thought. The busyness in my mind, in the so-called darkness, is undisturbed by the constant flow of visual sense images. Picture thoughts as stars; during the daytime, sunlight obscures them. But not for me. When I listen to music, for example, my mind is at the ready—ready to be surprised and delighted by every note, every chord. This is one of the compensations for the loss of eyesight.
After a half century of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only really worthwhile things in the world are people and ideas.
It has been said about people like us Fellows that the common ingredients are pluck and purpose. To which might be added ambition.
The larger point is this: Business matters, and business success can be greatly rewarding in multiple ways. But family matters infinitely more.
He thinks the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is great.
It is all too frequently just not practical for me to wait around while someone earns my trust. Hence, that casual everyday term: blind trust. I am something of a Federal Reserve of trust, doling it out—sometimes reluctantly, often under pressure of circumstance—as if there is no end to it. Yet I admit my reliance on trust. The oft-repeated phrase of modern diplomacy “trust but verify” may sound wise at first blush, but it is actually an oxymoron. If you do the one, the other is negated.
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.”
We blind people cannot go toward a horizon, nor can we feel the limitation of space suggested by a horizon.
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.
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.
To experience the beauty of an idea is to experience joy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I need a lot of extra help in living my life. In the process, I necessarily offer my trust to people, which may trigger a correspondingly generous response, especially from good people who happen to be imbued with the spirit of helping others. In other words, I suspect that a reciprocity is established. Whether that is so or not, the fact is that my reliance on so many people has greatly enriched my life.
“to be in the tikkun olam business,” evoking a solemn commandment of the Jewish religion literally to repair the world.
I cite this company as an example of the kind of business that has attracted me. It was an opportunity to do something for my larger community. As Tom Stoppard wrote, “Information is light.” That this and other companies I founded did very well gave me the means to indulge my Call in ways unavailable to most Americans.
But throwing deep is not the same as acting rashly or, in the case of a Hail Mary pass, from desperation. Throwing deep is acting toward that which one truly desires, after having considered—and rejected or countered—the limitations.
To throw deep is to honor one’s highest beliefs and aspirations. It is to answer the Call, to fulfill our tikkun olam, whatever that solemn vow might be.
Pride that I’d managed the impossible despite Moses Hadas’s malevolent benediction—finished at Columbia and with my own class, won fellowships and advanced degrees at Harvard and Columbia, attended Oxford and Harvard Law School, been a White House Fellow, served on important boards, founded highly successful businesses, made much more than a good living for my wife and children, even helped launch a substantial prize that my wife and I believe will help end blindness forever.
A famous prayer in the Jewish religion has taken on new meaning for me. It is the Shehecheyanu: “Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has kept us in life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this glorious moment.” For me, that glorious moment arrived as I sat on that stone bench on the Columbia campus, my journey finally over.
I am not just one soul. Nor, would I suppose, are you.
What a gas! And how rewarding. I’ve been planning this party my entire life—a blow-out thank-you gala for the myriad people living and dead, things, forces, concepts, even creatures that have helped shape my life and led me to where I am at this very moment, sitting at my desk, dictating the end of these remembrances. That’s humbling enough.
The past sets the table for the present; the present must take care to set the table for the future. That single insight, so hard-won and to me so precious, might well serve as a coda.