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

Mostly, though, our neighbors were guarded in their speech, for many of them had fled a holocaust. Although I was young then and did not know what lay behind, around, and under that silence, I sensed a bit of it. All in all, it was as if we were living in the Dark Ages.

Making music is like a prescription for a disease that cannot be cured but whose symptoms can be alleviated.

The dreamer’s world was a secret hideaway for me during the lean, gray years. In the competitive school world, the doer stepped forward as needed and gradually took the helm. But the old dreamer was only dormant, biding his time. Now, as this fellow dreamer spoke of alternate colors for grass, I recognized at once that something of great importance was being granted to me. How little I grasped, at the time, just how great it was.

As my freshman year moved along, I developed nothing less than a hunger for art. The museums were, for me, sanctuaries, holy places. My two, going on three, years in the city with my eyesight still functional provided me with a storehouse of art—images archived in my memory. I learned to use art to live, not just “appreciate” it in passing.

One then realizes how much of one’s mental life had been anchored in the world one saw. This is something that you, the reader, must contemplate, if you are sighted, in order to understand much of what my account is about.

“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.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.

I myself am open with others—as I so often must be. As noted earlier, 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. Yet another compensatory balance, perhaps.

As I look out over the crowd, perhaps it is from exhaustion that I feel my heart fill almost to bursting. It is a moment of immeasurable, inexpressible wonder and joy. 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. Suddenly there are tears running down my cheeks. Why? Why the tears? Why the joy? I do not understand. All that comes to mind is the blessing that is life. Some may call it a mixed blessing, but for me—and you may well think of me as blind to reality—it is simply an uncountable succession of blessings. But how can there be such a thing as only blessings?

I consider: That I have chosen life and embraced it. That I have a golden place in life, with family and friends.

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.