A CLEARER VISION.

Sight Unseen

Georgina Kleege

Yale University Press, $25, 233 pp.

Blindness may be counted among the nightmare terrors of the hale and hearty. The well-known lines of Milton in Samson Agonistes, "Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, / Dungeon or beggary, or decrepit age!" have a poignancy that touches the very core of this fear. It is a sad reflection on contemporary society that the sightless are not merely blind. They are, as in the Miltonian expression, "blind among enemies," since they live among people who fear, loathe, repulse, abhor, and-if it were in their power-would avoid the mere mention of blindness and the blind. We fear what we do not understand, and sightlessness is undoubtedly one of the least understood forms of disability. And yet, many of us will have to live with diminished and diminishing eyesight. As the aging population grows, so does the number of the visually impaired. Two-thirds of individuals considered "legally blind" are over fifty-five years of age, and 25 percent of the elderly will develop cataracts.

Sight Unseen, by Georgina Kleege, is a book that goes a long way toward promoting a balanced attitude that seeks to understand the implications, and therefore mitigate the pangs, of this affliction. It exposes the smugness, the cant commiseration, the hypocritical complacency, and outright irrationality with which the blind must daily contend. The fact that the author is blind is germane to this book's superior merit. This circumstance imparts to every page the power of concrete personal experience, which is more appealing, and strikes the reader more forcefully, than abstract generalities or second-hand impressions. But it is not an autobiography. The author tells us at the outset that her purpose is not introspection, a kind of narrative in which the blind, undistracted by the spectacle of outer reality, have traditionally excelled. Rather, Kleege introduces us candidly, gently, without unseemly gesturing, and with not even a shade of self-pity, into the ordinary experience that controls daily life bereft of visual function. Next, she holds a mirror to the world, and by allowing us to look on ourselves, makes us see how the blind, in their turn, perceive us. For the blind see the sighted, and theirs is, by far, the finer percipience.

With an impeccable, elegantly sparing prose, Georgina Kleege scans the widespread prejudices. One chapter examines the way in which the blind are represented in film. It may seem a cruel joke, worthy of a farce of dubious taste, that a blind person should launch into a discussion of films; but this impression only underscores the prevailing ignorance about blindness. Very few are those who suffer the full tragedy of sudden and total loss of vision. In most cases, the world does not sink abruptly into complete blackness, but fades gradually in a mist that stunts the contours of things and erases their colors. Or else the center of the visual field is blotted out, as if marred by slowly spreading soot, while the periphery remains unsullied. Alternatively, as happens due to enlarging lesions that compress certain parts of the visual system inside the skull, the periphery is obscured, and the center stays clear, as if the observer peeked at the world through a progressively narrowing tube. In any case, sufficient time elapses for the patient to adjust to the loss, and to develop compensatory mechanisms that partly reverse it (tilting the head a certain way, bringing objects into exaggerated proximity with the eyes, and so on). Moreover, one "sees" with more than just the eyes. Sundry auditory stimuli-the musical score, the reaction of the audience-joined with partial or mutilated vision, enable many legally blind persons to form an objectively valid opinion on movies.

As to the cinematic portrayal of the blind, it is far from accurate. "Actors [adopt] an unblinking, zombie stare, directing their gazes upward to give the face of a supplicating look of helplessness." For the stereotype is generally negative, dwelling on the utter dependency, and the attendant timidity, resentment, crankiness, and social alienation of the blind. From Terence Young's thriller Wait until Dark in the 1960s, to Martin Brest's film Scent of a Woman, with Al Pacino in the 1990s, Kleege concludes that the treatment of the blind on the cinematic screen has been mostly exploitative or biased.

Interesting chapters bear on the depiction of the blind in literature, the cultural significance of "eye contact," and varied aspects of the psychophysiology of vision, in a language that should make difficult concepts accessible to nonspecialist readers. But the tone is never dry or didactic. Savory vignettes and asides, ranging from personal anecdotes and reflections to a brief sketch of the life and times of Louis Braille (of tactile-reading fame), add zest to the work, which, in the finest tradition of nonfiction writing, delights and instructs at the same time.

The worthiest teaching of Sight Unseen, however, is not to be sought in the transmittal of vision-related information. It is a higher, more valuable lesson: the demonstration that the plight of the blind is partly its own reality, and largely the creation of the normally sighted. As Kleege puts it, "what you fear is not the inability to adapt to the loss of sight, it is the inability of people around you to see you the same way. It's not you, it's them." A wiser, better- balanced concept must emerge. For many of us are bound to be disabled one way or another, visually or otherwise. We should thus learn to consider blindness as other than irredeemable wretchedness. Jorge Luis Borges-a blind man himself-wrote that blindness "must not be thought of in a pathetic way but as a way of life: as one of the styles of man's life."

F. Gonzalez-Crussi, M.D. is head of the Department of Pathology of the Children's Memorial Hospital of Chicago. His latest book is There Is a World Elsewhere.