Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: How Daring Dreams and Unyielding Friendship Turned One Man’s Blindness Into an Extraordinary Vision for Life

by Sanford D. Greenberg

Miss Borlak had touched upon one of the painful truths of my situation. It was indeed inappropriate, even unfair, to burden my friends, and in particular Arthur. I could not easily travel alone.

The episode that has come to define me began that same day, outside the institute offices at 3:30 p.m. Arthur suddenly remembered that he had to turn in a sketch of the famous Seagram Building, also in Midtown, at nine o’clock the next morning. He asked me what we should do. I told him that I expected a reader back uptown at the university in an hour and that we had better start back right away because I would like to be on time. He replied that wasn’t an option: he had to stay in Midtown and complete the sketch, as it would count heavily toward his final grade. For the next few minutes we discussed the alternatives and concluded that there weren’t any. By this time, our attitudes had become polarized: Arthur stuck to his position while I insisted that I not

miss my reader appointment. The discussion turned into a debate as to the merits of the other person’s “giving in.” This made Arthur an even more stubborn proponent of his proposal that I stay in Midtown with him, while I dug in on the other side, claiming that were I to miss this reader, I would be finished at Columbia. We wasted half an hour in this way. “Well, if that’s the way you want it, so be it,” I said. “I’ve got to get back.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, I’m sure.” I felt that I was being abandoned but shrugged it off and began to move forward as though I was part of the crowd. And so I was. Arthur had now left me. I could feel that; his smell, his voice, his presence—all had disappeared. I would have to take the subway back up to the campus by myself. So why did I not just get into a taxi? The mentality of scholarship students figures here. We did not even think of taking taxis—a blatant waste of precious funds. My stubbornness was a factor, too. I didn’t realize that the ordeal ahead of me would take on an almost mythic cast. I began to walk in the direction of what I thought was the subway entrance. As I walked, I held my arms out in front. That must have looked silly to the people around me, now on their way home from work. My hands and forearms came up against suited elbows and women’s backs although most of the people must have known to give me a wide berth. There is always a spark of kindness in this world. A woman asked me where I was going. I said that I was tr...

The woman seemed young, but she had a throaty voice. As she walked along with me, she touched me here and there to make sure I did not step too widely out onto the street. “I’ll find it,” I said. “If you’re sure you’ll be okay, then I’ll tell you,” she said. “But you have to promise me that you’ll be okay. That you’re up for it. It’s not an easy thing.” “I am. I will be.” She gave me the directions. She explained how many steps this way and then how many steps that...

Can you tell me where I am?” “New York,” the man said. “Am I close to Grand Central Station?” “Very close. Right across the way there.” “Can you point me in the right direction?”

I made it down into the cavernous main area of the station, which I knew was both broad and complex. I was aware from my sighted experience that I would have to find my way to the crosstown shuttle train to Times Square. The shuttle would take me west to a change to the uptown Broadway train, which would

then take me some seventy blocks north to Columbia. It gave me a sinking feeling. I asked someone how to get through the central hall to the shuttle area.

Being told directions is one thing; following them when you are blind is another. I knocked into benches, suitcases, briefcases; into people who had their backs to me. I stumbled on coffee cups that people had placed at their feet. Somehow, the skin on my shins got split open; I felt blood wetting my socks. My knees seemed to be swelling, probably because I had banged them so many times. I wanted to be both dead and alive, but alive only if I could get out of that pit. Fortunately, I recalled some landmarks from my days with vision, and travelers around me answered my questions and turned me in the right directions. By this method, bumping into people and asking questions, I made it to the general area where I could take the shuttle train crosstown to Times Square. When I hit a turnstile, I reached into my pocket for a token, felt around the turnstile for the token slot, and paid my fare. A small thing, but it was huge to me. I was walking toward the track when I bumped head-on into an iron column. My arms, which had been held out like a zombie’s, had missed it completely and it was my face, instead, that met it. Blood came down my forehead. I swiped at it with my forearm. It hurt, but worse than the hurt was the idea that everyone would see me bleeding. I wished that because I could not see people, they could not see me. I swung around to get away from the column. My forehead was still bleeding, but I think it had stopped a little. The smell down in the subway was greasy ...

I lunged backward, changed direction slightly, raised my arms once more as I pushed onward.

“Good luck. It’s always the hardest, at first,” she said cryptically, “but then it gets easier, I think.”

I walked until I stumbled, and when I stumbled it was forward. My hand reached over a ledge, beyond which was the space where the train would arrive. I did not know whether one was arriving at that exact moment, but if it had, my head and shoulders were exposed so completely that I would have been severed in half. It would have been a reasonable way to go—quick and painless. I would be missed, of course, but I would no longer have to fake being a regular guy. And perhaps, lying there on the subway platform, I was already receiving the punishment for what I had done, for not accepting the reality of my situation.

that if they relied on me for some sense of stability in their world, then it would be selfish of me to let myself go. That was followed by a second flash of insight. Sue, Arthur, and the others not only relied on me; they cared for me, cared so much that I had a reciprocal responsibility to them—not to wallow in self-pity or throw myself on the sword of my own self-esteem but to stop trying to camouflage my blindness from those closest to me. The train was coming. I got up and righted myself. I boarded with the others and gasped a sigh of relief. When my knees pressed against a seat, I sat. I was halfway home. My legs were bleeding, but the bleeding from my head, I think, had stopped.

Then I smelled a familiar odor—something light, pleasant, something that had no place down here. I didn’t know what it was. Where and when to exit was no challenge. The westbound shuttle made only one stop. Recalling a large gap between the train and the platform, I made

sure that I took a giant step out onto the platform at the Times Square station. As I was feeling my way out of the car and onto the platform, I bumped into another man. There was again that sense of something familiar.

Columbia. I turned to ask anyone near me whether this was the uptown local to Columbia at Broadway and 116th. A man’s voice—muffled, as if he were trying not to be heard—responded: “Yes, it’s the right platform.” He added that the local was the track to my left.

Instead, I got on the train and found a seat. The train pulled out. I was almost completely exhausted.

Why had I not simply waited with Arthur while he made his sketch of the Seagram Building? None of this nightmare trip would have happened.

After quite a few stops, the PA system announced mine, and then my weary feet got me to the top of the subway steps at 116th Street. I do not think I was ever happier to find myself back at the university. I felt my way to the iron gates and went through onto College Walk. As I began to make my way, I was stopped by a young man I recognized by smell as Arthur. “Oops, excuse me, sir,” he said, a slight sardonic emphasis on the last word. Then, in his normal voice, he said abruptly, “I knew you could do it…but I wanted to be sure you knew you could do it.” He had been shadowing me all along. He later admitted that he had in fact not been assigned to sketch the Seagram Building at all. We were silent for a moment as we stood near the university gates. I wanted to kill him. Then I became euphoric. I grabbed his hands, exultantly raised them, and swung him around me. In sweeping circular motions, we waltzed out onto College Walk.

I don’t know if Arthur had a cathartic moment of his own then. I can say only that I realized something profound—my friends and family had become angels who would be with me and never leave. I was strong because of the strength we gave each other.

Nevertheless, I held on to the notion that something was possible. Something like an appeal or a pardon or the arrival of the cavalry in the nick of time. In a word: hope.

right? Here’s what you do. When you’re introduced, get real close to him, face to face, look him straight in the eye, and say ‘blue mud.’” Typical Arthur.

The sound of him undoing the envelope seemed to go on endlessly. The letter finally unsheathed, Arthur stood up and in an exaggerated British accent read, “It is with great pleasure …” Harvard wanted me to join its graduate program in government.

You have been elected to Phi Beta Kappa.”

After our wedding, Sue and I moved into an apartment at 19 Wendell Street in Cambridge, a tiny fourth-floor walk-up barely large enough for the furniture we had scraped together.

The bleakest day of all—among the bleakest in American history—was November 22, 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy affected every one of us profoundly. He had represented everything good about the country.

I didn’t know it at the time because I hadn’t been able to answer the phone, but I had my PhD. Stitches and all, I was now Dr. Sanford D. Greenberg, the crowning achievement of an educational odyssey that seemed (in my fevered memory) to have endured as many challenges as that famous odyssey chronicled by Homer 2,500 years ago. Far more important to me, I had also found the opportunity along the way to begin reimbursing Arthur for his endless kindness.

Sue and I were still in Oxford when I got a call from Arthur, who was now in architecture school. “Sandy, I’m really unhappy. I don’t like being in architecture school. I don’t like doing this.” “So what is it you want to do?” I asked. “I really love to sing,” he said. “You remember my high-school friend Paul, the guy who plays the guitar? We want to try our hand in the music business, but in order to do that, I have to have $400.” This was in 1964—$400 was a lot of money then. In fact, Sue and my entire savings amounted to just over that amount, but I sent the money off to Arthur immediately. What else could I possibly have done?

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.

Arthur put his finger directly on this when, during that walk on Saranac Avenue in Buffalo so long ago, he reminded me that the words of the greats we were studying at Columbia were far more than mere words. The libraries at Columbia, the Bodleian at Oxford, the Widener at Harvard, and the main New York Public Library on 42nd Street: these have all been for me an extension of the great wisdom underlying the Acropolis and the Temple Mount and Jabneh. How I love dropping the names of the great thinkers and innovators of history who made it possible for me to come back from that hospital bed in Detroit. And the names of the teachers who enabled my learning. Why not? This is my account, and I owe so much to them all.

The larger point is this: Business matters, and business success can be greatly rewarding in multiple ways. But family matters infinitely more.

People without sight have a special reverence for trust. I must trust people to lead me in places where I have never been. I must trust people to read written materials to me accurately and completely. I must trust accountants and business partners (and there have been betrayals in my life), as well as people who make change for me, especially with paper currency, and so on. Many are people I have encountered by chance, and so they surely cannot yet have earned my trust. 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.

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 heard 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 nigh...

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.

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’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.

Something special about us blind people—and this, I have come to realize is an unqualified asset—is that we do not see horizons.

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.

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.

Ideas can be beautiful in and of themselves,

To experience the beauty of an idea is to experience joy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Currently, the focus is primarily on developing a visual cortical implant that bypasses the eye and optic nerve completely. So far, six subjects have been implanted with good results.” Six subjects is far from clinical confirmation, but the very real possibility that the blind can “see” essentially without working eyes and a functioning optic nerve suggests just how bold and daring the thinking has become in a field that once offered only alternatives to sight instead of hope for its recovery.

Sometime later Sol called me and said that he would like me to meet Dr. Jonas Salk of polio vaccine fame.