Under the Spur of Handicaps

CHANG YO, the sage, so the fable goes, sat cross-legged by the side of the road. He was very old and very wise. He was also very heavily afflicted. His eyes were dim, his step faltering, his back bent, and suffering had carved great lines in his aged face. There came to him a man far less sorely afflicted than he. This man sat at the feet of the wise Chang Yo by the side of the road.

Presently there crawled down the road a man so burdened with afflictions that Chang’s companion gave a cry of sympathy and of horror. ‘There goes a man with whom I should dread to change places,’ said Chang’s disciple fervently.

‘Of course,’ Chang answered quietly. ‘But that man would not change places with you. Nor would he with me. Nor would I with him or with you. You would gladly have your afflictions lifted. So would I. That man crawling in the road would want to be free of his heavy burdens, certainly. But if the price for freedom from his burdens should be the taking on of yours or mine, or the new, untried, unfamiliar burdens of anybody else, that man would cling to his own familiar burdens.’

I HEAR WITH MY EYES

BY EARNEST ELMO CALKINS

IT is perhaps unfair for me to compare my handicap with Mr. Lathrop’s, for he is wholly blind, while I am but partially deaf. It is true that without the electrical instrument I use I cannot hear a sound, but with it I still have a link, however tenuous, with the world that hears. But I know enough of deafness and the feeling of total deafness to be sure I would not give my eyes to have back my ears. For I heard with them abnormally well when I was very young. My hearing was particularly acute, and the loss was gradual. For fifty-five years I have experienced the slow recession of the world of sound. To-day, with considerably more years than Mr. Lathrop has, my hearing, with even electricity’s artful aid, is sketchy and elementary. I could not understand a word if my eyes did not come to the rescue. Hearing with me is a mixture of fragmentary sounds plus lip reading. I am almost but not quite on a par with Mr. Lathrop as an antagonist.

But of course such a debate is logically an impossibility. A blind man and a deaf man cannot discuss the respective values of eyes or ears. Each would have had to experience blindness and deafness both to be an impartial judge. Each of us places the highest value on the senses he has left. That is natural, and it holds great promise to human nature that it is natural. Most of us who lack a sense wish we had that one back, but when it comes to trading another for it we hesitate.

The idea is old and has furnished the theme for many a fable, fairy story, and folk tale. In these anecdotes some sufferer is always crying out to the gods for relief from some misfortune. He finds that the price of relief is the loss of something else, or some new burden placed on him. If he accepts he is worse off than before. Also the factor of adaptability enters. As Hamlet said, we bear the burdens we have rather than ‘fly to others that we know not of.’

Mr. Lathrop makes a fine brief for blindness in his own case, but that merely reveals his own high-hearted philosophy of life. I too can make out a good individual case, for I too have a philosophy which has served me well. I believe that I am happier, all things considered, than the average man. I know I am happier than a great many who have all their senses. I have more resources. I am never bored. I have missed most of the standardized devices created to kill time, to entertain. I do not go to the theatre; I was never in a night club; I cannot hear jazz; I get nothing from phonograph or radio; I do not know how to dial a telephone or drive a motor car. Nor do I miss a single one of these things.

They have all (except the theatre) arisen on the amusement horizon since I became more or less deaf. They are all devised to amuse people who have difficulty in amusing themselves. I have no such difficulty. Being thrown on my own resources, I have developed latent sources of entertainment which are apparently inexhaustible. I read a good deal and get a great deal out of reading. Lord Birkenhead once said, ‘I cannot understand why people who know how to read want to go to the theatre.5 That was said by a man who could hear; I get considerable comfort out of it. There are books enough in the world to outlast my lifetime. I do not always read good books; sometimes I read bad ones. I can enjoy many kinds of writing — both John Milton and Ogden Nash, for instance. I taught myself to read French (not to converse in it, naturally; I cannot converse in even my own language) to widen my field of reading.

Even more entertaining are the things I do with my hands. I work with tools, and make all sorts of things — ship models, miniature wagons and coaches, odd pieces of furniture, book ends, boxes, things foolish and useful. I dabble with wood, metal, leather, cloth (I can run a sewing machine), clay, wax, plaster. I am constantly finding new lines to work in — carving soap, for instance. If these should fail me, I can go in for a small private press, for I am also a printer.

People often say to me, ‘I wish I were as clever as you are.’ The point is that I am not clever. Every one of those who look at my work and exclaim over it could do it exactly as well, or better. I had the motive to develop facilities we all possess, the urge to occupy time that would otherwise be left on my hands, and practised until I acquired a certain proficiency. Men say to me in deprecation, ‘I can’t even drive a nail.’ They fail to realize that none of us is born with the knack of driving a nail. Many men do the things I do as a hobby though they have no physical handicap. They have learned the complete satisfaction of recreations that do not depend on other people.

I give these instances merely to show that the deaf need not be a group cut off from the world, hovering on the outside of social life, depending vainly on hearing people’s amusements or entertainment. People say to me, ‘It is a pity you cannot hear the radio.’ It would be hard to convince them that I don’t want to hear the radio, that I have never missed it, that I have something better. I would not go so far as to insist that a deaf person is better off than one who can hear, but he can be better off than many people who do hear.

He is certainly better off than one who has lost his eyesight. Mr. Lathrop is a wonderful exception. But even his splendid acceptance of his own lot does not prove that blindness is per se preferable to deafness. Mr. Lathrop, had he become deaf instead of blind, would have triumphed as magnificently over his fate. He is an exceptional person. But the human tradition is all against him. Blindness has always been the greater tragedy. It appeals to the better side of people; it is never comic, but deafness is often comic. The blind man’s mistakes are pitiful; the deaf man’s are frequently funny. The same kind of mistake made by each produces opposite reactions. If a blind man misses a step and comes down hard on nothing, not even the most frivolous person would find it amusing. If a deaf man misses a word and starts off on the wrong tack, even his closest friends smile. And the deaf man can see the smile, whereas the blind man cannot.

This, I take it, is the unconscious but unanimous judgment of humanity. They have not debated the question among themselves and come to conclusions about it. They have merely responded to their instincts. The courts sustain them. Damages for loss of eyesight are always greater than those awarded for loss of hearing. Nature values eyes above ears; she has given us nearly twenty times as many optic nerves as she has aural. And so it goes.

The debate to which Mr. Lathrop has so gallantly challenged me is not a discussion of blindness versus deafness. It is his blindness against my deafness — a very different matter. It would be possible to choose a blind man less philosophic than Mr. Lathrop and a deaf man far more unfortunate than I am, with quite different conclusions. Each of us must draw on his own experience, and there I have another advantage. He puts a good face on his blindness, but that is, as I have said, merely his own dauntless heroism. I too can make out a good case for deafness, and the point is, I have already done it, so I cannot be suspected of cooking it up for this particular occasion. Some ten years ago I wrote a little piece called ‘On the Technique of Being Deaf,’ afterward incorporated in my autobiography, ‘Louder Please!’ in which I established what is undoubtedly the outstanding alleviation of deafness, not merely in my case but in all cases. May I quote: —

After all, even the deaf are not deaf all the time. They are not deaf when there is no occasion to hear. According to the subjective theory, — which I advise all deaf people to adopt, — sound does not exist unless there are ears to hear. As I remember the sentence from the old schoolbook: ‘Niagara thundered in silence for thousands of years until there appeared upon earth a being with ears.’ I find it profitable and amusing to cut down the time when I am unavoidably deaf and increase that when I am on a par with the acute-eared. It works like the old dial-motto, which counted only the hours the sun shone. I have thus not unbroken, unrelieved deafness to deal with, but intermittent deafness — say deafness of two or three hours a day.

What Mr. Lathrop gives us is a picture, modest and unconscious, but none the less convincing, of a man still in his prime, overtaken by one of the supreme catastrophes of life, who bears it so bravely that he can even engage in an argument to prove that his burden is not so great as we all know it is. No one can read what he writes without being better for it. ‘No life,’ said Owen Meredith, a romantic poet popular in my boyhood, ‘can be sure in its purpose or strong in its strife, and all life not be purer and stronger thereby.’

Mr. Lathrop does not prove his contention that blindness is preferable to deafness. His moving story would not convince a person of normal eyesight and hearing, let alone a deaf man. The person with normal eyesight and hearing might hesitate a moment if suddenly confronted with the question, ‘Which sense would you rather dispense with?’ But the deaf man knows instantly and instinctively that he would rather be deaf than blind.

What Mr. Lathrop’s story does prove is that the human soul can triumph magnificently over any environment, that even so great a tragedy as loss of sight need not embitter life, and that poor human nature possesses reservoirs of compensation unrealized until drawn upon.

I SEE WITH MY EARS

BY GORDON LATHROP

I MUST confess at the outset that I have deliberately misrepresented my optical condition. I am not wholly blind. Mr. Calkins thinks so. I let him think so. I have taken advantage of him. The score at the end of the first paragraph, therefore, is: Advantage Lathrop.

Natural advantages are virtually all with the deaf in comparison with the blind. It is true that this is a visual world. It appears to have been ordained for sighted persons and animals. The mole and the shrew, the bugs and the worms without sight, the blind fish and reptiles of the land and water, must hide themselves in darkness deeper than the eyes of other creatures have power to penetrate. Who has ever seen a live blind eagle? It would stay alive not for long. Vultures and buzzards would get it. Nature is not kind to the blind.

Humanity is, though. Mr. Calkins, for instance, is too kind to me. I have not earned the praise he gives me. Subway guards, tough taxicab boys, waiters and waitresses, apartment house janitors, clerks, office boys, laborers, factory managers and workers, superintendents, general managers, vice presidents and presidents of this or that, doctors, lawyers, merchants, and chiefs are kind to me and to all blind folk. Humanity rises up en masse and individually to spank Nature when she turns her harsh breath too strongly in the direction of the blind. Humanity compensates Nature’s bland impersonality toward all living organisms. The blind should turn their thoughts to the study of man, their benefactor, letting Nature go about her strange business in her own inimitable way. She will, anyhow.

When I asked if anyone had seen a live blind eagle, it did not occur at the moment that this might be possible; but the eagle would be in a cage. It could not be free and blind. If I am to use the caged eagle as a figure to illustrate the condition of the blind I must bring in other creatures. We are not all eagles. Homer was; so was Milton. But we blind folk are just as conglomerate a group as would be an equal number of men, women, and children picked at random. Some of us are eagles, some fox persons, some weasels, some lions, some fish, and some sparrows. I think of myself as some kind of rodent, a gnawing and burrowing animal. I am not as energetic as the beaver or as timid as the mouse, but somewhere in between these two I see my type. Perhaps I am a prairie dog. When I had eyesight it was unusually keen, and during my very early teens I lived in a little town on the Western plains. With my .22calibre rifle I shot many a prairie dog to death, not realizing that perhaps I was bringing an especially heavy curse on my head for annihilating animals of my own nature. But this could scarcely be proved.

Any blind animal must be caged to preserve his life. This, if not a law of nature, is a fact of nature. Blindness in itself is imprisonment. The cage represents double slavery — slavery of the body and of the spirit. The caged animal loses its spirit.

Blindness to a scrappy man or woman, however, — and at this point I must call myself blind rather than suffering from impaired eyesight in order to get in on the applause, — constitutes the most thrilling challenge to freedom of the spirit of any affliction visited on man. Blindness may be high adventure, and often is—more often than deafness.

To go back to the first paragraph, in which I corrected the impression given by Mr. Calkins’s first paragraph. He said the argument between him and me would not be fair to me because, while I was wholly blind, he was only partially deaf. This is one of the few instances in which my duplicity with respect to the condition of my eyesight proves to be only partially successful. Here, then, is the truth: —

My universe is not pitch-black. It is pearl-gray. On bright days there are glints of gold in it. The shade of gray is soft and rather luminous. The night is no darker to me than to you, and street lights swim into my vision like ghostly blurbs of light, without form or substance, but yet I know what they are.

In the daytime, shadows appear before me. I can see a shadow of a man walking past me on the sunny side of the street better than I can see the man. I recognize trees and barn doors, but not until I run into them. I have what is called light perception, but yet I have not sufficient eyesight to walk alone safely down the quietest street.

I have not seen a face in more than seven years. Yet I can distinguish a white hand against a dark dress or coat, and black and white tiles on a barber-shop floor are especially visible to me. It will be seen that my equipment of eyesight has little practical value. Yet it is enough for me to base my philosophy of blindness upon and be reasonably honest. My personal philosophy may be summed up in a few words: —

I do not have to be blind in the brain, too.

Out of this not uncommendable credo has sprung my double life. I am blind in the eyes and admit it. I go further than admitting the truth. I let people think I am stone-blind, blind as a bat, that I live in perpetual night. I fulfill to the world its exaction to the last drop of the wine of its traditions. I am selfish in this, and calculating. Blindness connotes tragedy. Tragedy brings out the best side of human beings, especially when the tragic figure walks more or less bravely through his part. I am not fighting for preservation of the sight power in my eyeballs any longer. One needs all his energies to preserve the vital idea that is hidden under every outward aspect. My blindness is an outward aspect. My idea, hidden deeply within myself, is that I can see enough at any rate to keep me intensely interested in living.

Of course, when I say to myself I can see enough, I do not mean that the vague shadows are enough. Neither do I see clairvoyantly, nor in any esoteric manner. Chiefly, I see with my ears. I see with what Mr. Calkins has not, and he hears with what I lack. I do not believe he has advantage over me in the broad sense, though his accomplishments are so much greater than mine that the case would be adjudged proved in his favor. It is not in me to do the things he has done.

It is quite true that no one can generalize about blindness or deafness. This controversy really is Mr. Calkins’s deafness against my blindness, and his has been the better job of compensat ion winning.

Compensation for deafness or blindness, I believe Mr. Calkins would say with me, does not rush automatically to the afflicted. One must win it. An affliction contains no virtue per se. It is a challenge, that is all. Yet this in itself often proves to be a godsend, a spur to the spirit and a gateway to a world more satisfying than the one we knew before. I can say with Mr. Calkins that I am happier than many who have eyesight.

I have strayed far away from the blind eagle in the cage, or the prairie dog, and shall return to them. But first, let me summarize: I say to myself that I am suffering merely from impaired vision. This I do in order to maintain more or less logical contact with my inward thought that I am blind to no greater degree than my mind is inactive. To people I announce I am blind, so that the traditions, the mass thought about blindness, will influence them to turn toward me their best sides. I should receive the benefit of only a portion of a good side should I use to them the colder phrase, ‘impaired vision.’ This duplicity might be called playing both the positive and the negative poles of a situation for all the values in them. It really is fair, and hurts no one, not even myself, at any rate not so long as I remember to keep the two rôles in separate compartments of thought.

I am for humanity. I think it is ‘swell,’ as one of my classmates said the other day about the cosmic universe. Oh, yes — I’ve started back to school. I am forty-three. Twenty-six years ago I left high school to go to work because of the need of my earning power. I wanted to study medicine. My father was a doctor. He died when I was four and left not enough for me to go to school beyond the third year of high.

I knew how to telegraph. I worked at this trade until a fever in my twenty-first year caused the loss of sight of one eye. I became a press telegrapher, then a reporter, editor, and correspondent. When my remaining eye failed I became a radio columnist.

Mr. Calkins does not like radio, but I love it as a mother loves her sturdiest child, the one who can chiefly be depended on. I did not need eyesight to review radio programmes.

In the part of the country where I conducted my column are many lonely men and women on farms and in tiny towns. I did what I could to clear the air for them by conducting campaigns against electrical interference and to give them better programmes, shouting loudly and constantly for the establishment of chain-station programmes within hearing distance of my fellow listeners. From columning I went into magazine writing, publicity, and then to school.

Now to my caged prairie dog. I was like such a creature when first I lost my sight. No philosophy I could bring to bear on my case could console me for my loss of physical freedom. It was not the eyesight loss, but the effects of it, if you follow me. The necessity of staying put, of forever depending on the arm of a friend or employee should I venture out. I was too old to learn successfully to walk alone, tap-tapping with a cane. Blindness in itself was bondage, and the loss of physical freedom on account of blindness constituted doubly distilled enslavement. I was bound to the wheel of Fate, and not all the philosophies and religions in the world could reconcile me. This was at first.

Gradually I began to feel the gracious thought of humanity toward the blinded. I began to like humankind better, and humankind responded by reaching out hands on every side. To a considerable degree the doors of my cage were opened.

Finally came my dog, Millie (I did n’t name her), to open my door wide. She is a Seeing Eye dog. This is the name of the organization training the German shepherd breed of canine for guide work.

Millie is to me what Mr. Calkins’s electrical device is to him, and more than that. She is companion, friend, and servant. She is always available, always efficient when in harness. We go to school together. I do not need the arm of a friend or employee now. I am as free as a blind man could be. Millie takes me across the busiest streets, up and down steps, waits for my need of her day and night. I am no longer a caged prairie dog. I am out again in the open, burrowing away at the things that interest me.

Sixty other blind men and women in this country have this type of guide dog. Many hundreds will be available in the course of time. The movement must be slow, because it is so largely experimental, particularly with respect to the obtaining and developing of the right type of trainers.

It has taken a long while for sympathetic humanity to work out a method of freeing the blind. But now that it has happened to so great a degree I think it may be said that the deaf, with their mechanical devices, have no great advantage over us, with our guide dogs. Mr. Calkins’s ears are in a box. My eyes are in the lovable head of Millie.

Now that I have Millie, I am less inclined to think of Nature as a cruel jade, unmindful of her battered children. For many hundreds of years this same breed of dog has been available to serve the blind, but neither humanity in general nor the blind themselves thought of it. Yet here was a type of Nature’s children right at hand to compensate for Nature’s bruising discipline to others of her huge family. Perhaps there is something in this compensation idea, after all. There may be compensation for every loss. The trick is to find it.

Perhaps there is a law. It may work up and down the scale of life. More and more I am suspecting this is so.

It may be that for every loss there is commensurate compensation. The deaf have not quite so difficult a task as the blind. But the blind have a more thrilling challenge. Potentially theirs is the greater compensation. This constitutes a potential advantage.

But I have not proved this, while Mr. Calkins has proved his point much more effectively by the things he can do. I am still, so to speak, in the experimental laboratory. It is better than a cage.