Word: sightlessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that supposedly contains the ashes of her brother Orestes. She drops where she stands with a wild animal cry; she clutches at the urn, cradles and rocks it in entwining arms, spasmodically tries to breathe it back to life with words of love, smothers it with the salty, sightless kisses of tears, the strangulated sobs of a soul bereft. She is an open wound bleeding passion, and the spectator sees what is almost too shameless to see, grief at the pitch of human endurance. In an admirable company-Athens' Greek Tragedy Theater, now at Manhattan's City Center...
...Good Light, by Karl Bjarnhof. Finding words for the things that are too terrible for words, this sightless author goes on with the fictionalized chronicle of his descent into blindness. A luminous sequel to its moving predecessor, The Stars Grow Pale...
...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...
...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...