6 ideas
The popular image of the blind living in blackness is false; gradual blindness leaves a luminous haze in which some colors persist. For the writer, black and red disappeared first while yellow remained, so he says he lives in a yellow-grey mist and even misses the darkness he cannot sleep in.
Sight that fades over decades arrives as a gradual twilight rather than a sudden catastrophe. The slowness removes the drama of loss and lets a person adapt continuously, so the condition becomes a way of living rather than a single event to be mourned.
In 1955 he was appointed director of Argentina's National Library just as he lost the ability to read. He calls it a divine irony that he was given a vast library and the loss of sight at the same moment, and notes that two earlier directors were also blind.
Everything that happens to a writer, humiliation, loss and sorrow included, is given as clay to be shaped into art. Viewed this way, blindness is an instrument rather than a punishment, and the right response is to ask what work it now makes possible.
Instead of grieving the visible world he had lost, he began studying Anglo-Saxon with a group of students, and later Old Norse. Learning a new language replaced the lost world with a fresh one and showed that loss can open a field of study as well as close one.
Homer, Milton and Joyce kept producing major work after losing sight. A writer without sight must hold whole drafts in the head, which pushes him toward rhyme, meter and classical forms because they can be memorized and revised mentally before being dictated.