In His Own World
I saw a blind guy on the train while riding home the other night. Now that’s not something I would go out of my way to remember, but this blind guy was also listening to an iPod and that struck me as odd.
It’s one thing to be blind and rely heavily on your sense of hearing to get around, so why would he cripple his seemingly essential other sense by plugging his ears with an iPod?
The woman sitting next to me reached out and touched him on the arm (which I cringed at because it seemed like such an intrusion into his own world through his last remaining sense) and when he pulled out a headphone, she asked if he wanted to sit. He said no and returned to listening to his music.
When I got out at my stop, I turned around to take another look and saw the guy taking my old seat next to the woman.
The whole thing just somehow struck me as odd… and for some reason, I guess I should remember it.
(On a side note, I should remember to check out more books from Jose Saramago who wrote Blindness about a whole city going blind which I absolutely loved and Seeing… Which I never finished.)
March 12th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
[...] after just remembering Blindness the other day, I saw in my weekly Time Out that there was a new play adapted from Jose Saramago’s Nobel [...]