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The three of us duly convened in Sol’s office for the better part of an afternoon. When the meeting was over, I walked outside and asked my driver to take me to a peaceful open space so I could be alone. At first, I only listened to the chatter of birds, but then my excitement grew. For the first time, I felt there was realistic hope for the promise I had made to God. The reason: Dr. Salk had urged upon me a focus beyond the treatment of a disease’s symptoms or its individual physiological effects. After all, he had made his own objective nothing less than to end a disease…and he succeeded! In
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“Even this we will be pleased to remember.”
But here’s my deepest secret: I absolutely believe that blindness can be ended, that justice for those of us forced to go through life in the dark half-light of the unsighted is well within our reach. Sue’s and my End Blindness by 2020 Prize isn’t meant to conjure up a miracle cure. We’re merely hoping to nudge the clock forward to a time when all God’s children can not only feel the sun shining on their faces but also witness with their own eyes its rising and its setting.
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.
Bugs Bunny;
The final cost for the party has not yet been determined. Fortunately, the party planner, my friend Art Linkletter, agrees with my principle: the more guests the merrier. I hope that Art will be fair, but as is usual in billing (and in life, too, for that matter), one never really knows until afterward.
we do remain, we know, in whatever etchings we have made in the character of those still living and yet to live, and on the earth that is home to all of us. So it is with great pride and comfort that we leave the children, clear-eyed and strong as we ever were and even more so, to raise anchor and move off into the waters on their own.”
I am no longer myself. I feel as if my skin has opened and I am nowhere and everywhere, and everyone and everywhere and everything are part of me.
I have no sense of a calculation of the bad measured against the good. I consider: That I have chosen life and embraced it. That I have a golden place in life, with family and friends.
do). I see my own soul joined with Arthur’s soul, just as it was written in 1 Samuel some three millennia ago: “The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”
Samuel goes on to say that “the Lord be between thee and me, and between my seed and thy seed, forever.”
This vision before me, coming so late in the party, is surely being offered to me not as something real, like a table or a trumpet or a galaxy, but as a benediction—that the promise Arthur and I made to each other long ago will be honored through future generations. I am not just one soul. Nor, would I suppose, are you.
All these guests, even those I couldn’t have met or barely know of, have been planning this party just for me at the same time. That’s how the world really works, I’ve come to realize. We’re connected across time and space—sometimes minute, sometimes infinite—with the entire history of our species, the whole of this fragile and wonderful earth. 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.
By intent, the duration between our 2012 announcement of the prize and its presentation on December 14, 2020—2,978 days—is exactly the same as the space between Jack Kennedy’s address to Congress and Armstrong’s first “giant leap for mankind.”
“In the Bible itself we hear of blindness, of people who could not see with their eyes but only their hearts. For millennia, humanity has struggled to understand and overcome blindness. Yet today we have the scientific tools necessary to reach for a cure—to restore the physical sight so many of us take for granted to those who otherwise live in darkness…”
(Art Garfunkel might have put it even better when he wrote of our Call: “We are searching for nothing less than light.”)
Later, Susan teamed Arthur and me up with a photographer to reenact our subway odyssey of fifty-five years earlier, as described in chapter 22. The resulting September 2016 National Geographic cover story, “The End of Blindness,” brought widespread attention to our cause. To further highlight the campaign, the famous—and blind—operatic tenor Andrea Bocelli performed at the 2015 plenary session.
Our Call to end blindness forever has taken root in the public’s imagination, just as landing on the moon did a half century ago.
To me, this was the chance of a lifetime to further my long-held belief that a cooperative approach among investigators “across all disciplines” will best get us to the ultimate goal. And I wasn’t going to waste it.
Between the two—our prize and the new Johns Hopkins center—blindness doesn’t have a chance. I may not be around to witness it, but before this century is out, blindness will disappear from the long roster of human injustices. And this, too, will be a giant leap for mankind.
gestalt
reason: This is a book—and a life—that would not exist without them. I am on every page, true, but no matter what direction I take in thinking about my life, each track invariably circles back to one or more of those who have helped me along the way.
