Word: blinds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...glimmer of sight left to the novel's hero makes him an outsider in the reverse-snob clannishness of the totally blind; yet he cherishes his tentative friendships. There is Little Jens, a cripple locked in creaky thongs and trusses, who has a gentle faith that all the sightless are under God's special bless ing. There is Adolf, who endlessly rubs his eyes so that he can "see" the spray of flames that constitutes his last childhood memory of the sighted world. Author Bjarnhof sensitively captures the circular, repetitive agony of a blind man's brooding...
...closing pages of this novel, the nameless hero stands at the entrance of his room, compulsively clicking the light switch on and off. To his dread, he knows the light is working; yet no glimmer cuts the dense black fog before his eyes; he has gone completely blind. Danish Author Karl Bjarnhof, 61, has an un nerving intimacy with this scene and subject, for, at the age of 19, he lost his sight. The Good Light continues the fictionalized autobiography Bjarnhof began with his remarkable The Stars Grow Pale (TIME, April 28, 1958), taking his hero from boyhood into adolescence...
...class but rarely worked; mother pasted paper bags together to earn a living. Narrowly pious and just poor enough for pride, the parents regarded the boy's failing sight as a kind of social stigma, rather like being born out of wedlock. To such a boy the Copenhagen Blind Institute seems a worthwhile escape hatch...
Endless Walkathon. Would-be philanthropic heavens too often become pluperfect hells. Just into his teens, the hero in The Good Light still has partial vision, but the first thing that assails him at the Blind Institute is the smell - paint, sour beer, and wet floor mops. The food is stale bread, dry cheese and gruel that the sightless inmates wolf down like animals. When the boy says good morning to his schoolmates, no one turns a head. He has entered a world in which nothing exists until it is touched...
...thought. Too often it is the student's retentive ability and not his grasp of subject matter that is tested. If the aim of a course is intelligent and independent thought on a given subject, then this should be the quantity tested, not, as so often happens, memory or blind luck in spotty preparation...