Andrew Leland

A witty, winning, and revelatory personal narrative of the author’s transition from sightedness to blindness and his quest to learn about blindness as a rich culture all its own “The Country of the Blind is about seeing—but also about marriage and family and the moral and emotional challenge of accommodating the parts of ourselves that scare us. A warm, profound, and unforgettable meditation on how we adjust to new ways of being in the world.” —Rachel Aviv, author of Strangers to Ourselves We meet Andrew Leland as he’s suspended in the liminal state of the soon-to-be blind: he’s midway through his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that ushers those who live with it from sightedness to blindness over years, even decades. He grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now sees the world as if through a narrow tube. Soon—but without knowing exactly when—he will likely have no vision left. Full of apprehension but also dogged curiosity, Leland embarks on a sweeping exploration of the state of being that awaits him: not only the physical experience of blindness but also its language, politics, and customs. He negotiates his changing relationships with his wife and son, and with his own sense of self, as he moves from his mainstream, “typical” life to one with a disability. Part memoir, part historical and cultural investigation, The Country of the Blind represents Leland’s determination not to merely survive this transition but to grow from it—to seek out and revel in that which makes blindness enlightening. Thought-provoking and brimming with warmth and humor, The Country of the Blind is a deeply personal and intellectually exhilarating tour of a way of being that most of us have never paused to consider—and from which we have much to learn.

A Memoir at the End of Sight

The Country of the Blind

Stephen Schenkenberg

My life held the lightest flavor of blindness, like a single lemon wedge floating in a pitcher of ice water.

I told Will about my own anxieties — how I felt like an impostor, constantly vacillating between feeling too sighted to be blind, and too blind to be sighted. "You might be going blind for a long time," Will said. He chewed a little, then added, "And at a certain point, you have to ditch the 'going blind narrative. That sounds kind of harsh, but... you'll just be blind. And then you might be less blind or more blind, but you're still just blind." This did sound harsh--like he was suggesting that I was playing up my experience of going blind for effect, even holding it over someone like him, who's already had his going blind" moment in a dramatic and concentrated way. Even the phrase going blind is problematic for him now, Will said: "*Going blind* has baked into it all the loneliness and isolation that we associate with blindness. A much more accurate way to describe it is 

: blindness is much more an arrival than a departure. 

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