Books Without Sight
June 2004
by Michael McGrorty
In 1930 my grandfather moved his family from El Paso to Los Angeles in search of a better life. The idea was good but the timing terrible: what they found was a city mired in the Depression. On their first day in the big city somebody stole their car. It was a sign of things to come. My grandfather, a very proud man who had been a police detective, couldn't find work; my grandmother was forced to sew in sweatshops so they could survive. My uncle recalled sneaking into the movies because he couldn't afford the dime. Their dreams of prosperity faded to a nightmare: eventually they were reduced to foraging for food in piles of rotten vegetables dumped at the freight depot.
Despite all this the children enjoyed themselves, as children will do. The Los Angeles Public Library was free and the kids went as often as they could. My mother was an especially avid reader. If nothing else she had all the free books she could carry. And then, as though the city of their hopes would have none of that, she began to go blind. In time a cataract condition imprisoned her in a twilight world where there was no school, very little play, and practically no reading except for the war-scare headlines in the newspapers.
For seven years, until her eyesight was restored by special treatments, she couldn't see well enough to find her little sister in the same room. She told me, "There is nothing like going blind. You lose the world." When her sight came back again she wore glasses thick as a thumb, but she read -- newspapers, novels, magazines-- every day of her life until she died.
Today I took a journey into the world of blindness, or at least as close as I could get with these sighted eyes. On the corner of Vermont and Melrose is the Braille Institute. Among their operations is a library.
On this warm afternoon I find a seat on a bench in the reading room at the institute library and scan the room; on shelves across from me is a collection of the World Book; on another shelf a line of magazines beckons, but neither of them is available to me, because, in a way, I am blind: these books are in Braille and my fingers are sightless. For a moment I know what it is not to be able to read. Across from me is a shelf of Braille magazines; all I can understand of them are their printed titles: Boy's Life, Kiplinger's, Popular Mechanics. Nearby is a table upon which rests a chess set and globe, each designed for use without sight. I close my eyes and run a finger along the raised contours of continents and meridians, feeling America, Europe, the broad, flat oceans. The chess pieces find their places in holes made in the board, made up of alternating high and low squares. I wonder how it would be to play a game by memory, unable to see the queen or the knight.
For all its usefulness Braille has one shortcoming: it takes up a lot of printed line space. The American Heritage Dictionary is twenty volumes; Bartlett's Familiar Quotations fills six feet of shelf. For this reason (and the fact that the vast majority of the blind do not read Braille) voice recordings have long been a popular option for sight-impaired people. The technology has changed from phonograph recordings to cassettes; Braille Institute is part of a network coordinated by the National Library Service of the Library of Congress whose work it is to create and circulate talking books to eligible people and institutions.
On a rolling book cart I find a row of green plastic boxes containing recorded books. Inside of one box I find The Portable Emerson; inside another Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four; next to that A Raisin in the Sun and beside that The Prince. Not a bad bunch of friends to spend an afternoon with.
A patron walks nearby, guided by his long white cane. He pulls a suitcase on rollers to the desk; inside are quite a few of the green cassette cases. I imagine him clicking on his recording machine to hear Dr. Watson narrate The Sign of Four as he rides home on the bus:
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
It was one thing to read that as a boy; it would have been quite another experience to have it read to me. The story first emerged in the February 1890 edition of Lippincott's Magazine -- I imagine that it wasn't until the invention of tape recording that the full text was available to those who could not read it for themselves. The world and the library are alike constructed by the fully sighted, for themselves.
At a table in the reading room I find a copy of the large-print weekly of The New York Times. The text size is comfortable for my middle-aged eyes. I wonder how many years I will go before it becomes a necessity rather than a convenience. One of my old New Year's resolutions was to learn Braille well enough to read simple texts. Perhaps I'll have to dust that idea off again.
Outside the light of a late spring day spreads across the boulevard. Hundreds of people drive their cars north and south, never realizing for a moment that they are seeing, using brain and the eyes to make sense of the world. A jacaranda tree throws a plume of purple-smoke blossoms against the sky; beneath on the sidewalk the man with the rolling suitcase waits, cane in hand, to cross the street.