sugar

My baby-sitter of many years was an old, black woman from the South named Thelma Tate, who was wiser than she knew herself to be. She was also, coincidentally, my father’s baby-sitter, and my parents had pulled some strings in our apartment building to get her a place, and I, in some way, inherited her. She had this undeniable charm, and one thing she used to say all the time has stuck with me forever. She would say, softly, “I see said the blind man,” and I would often playfully mimic her, unaware of what she truly meant. In Homer’s Odyssey, the poet Demodocus was endowed with the gift of song and paid with his ability to see, yet he was said to posses a profound knowledge of perspective. I’ve come to understand what Homer understood: sight is arguably more figurative than physical. Retrospection, to experience and then to internalize, is not really related to vision at all. A blind man may not be able to see, but this only fuels his sense of conviction and resolution, and in fact may make him more capable; because he can’t rely on sight, he must rely on his own comprehension.