Alles Nahe Werde Fern



I see him everyday in the bus. His name is Jack. I have always seen him smiling, talking and enjoying every little  pieces of life. He relies on his walking stick or some occasional generous help from someone. He can not see. World of colors does not convey any meaning to him. Shakespeare wrote: "Looking on darkness which the blind do see." But it is not entirely true when I turned into Jorge Luis Borges diary. These are the lines from his essay:

For me, blindness is a gift. I have exhausted you with gifts it has given me. It gave me Anglo-Saxon, it gave me some Scandinavian, it gave me a knowledge of a Medieval literature I had ignored, it gave me the writings of various books, good or bad but which justified the moment they were written. Moreover, blindness has made me feel surrounded by the kindness of others. People always feel good will toward the blind.

Goethe wrote Alles  nahe werde fern: everything near becomes distant. Goethe was referring to evening twilight. It is true at nightfall, things closest to us move away. So the visible world has moved away from Jack`s eyes, perhaps forever. But it does provide with one more instrument among the many--all of them so strange--that fate or chance provides.


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