Jorge Luis Borges. Credit Charles H. Phillips/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images.

Frank Bruni has written about his personal confrontation with potential loss of vision. In this column he writes of Joel Burcat, an environmental lawyer who has published a debut novel, “Drink to Every Beast,” after becoming legally blind. Bruni celebrates other authors who were blind or partially so, including James Joyce, James Thurber, John Milton, and Jorge Luis Borges.

[Burcat’s] words remind and comfort me, as I contemplate my own uncertain future, that writing isn’t an act of stenography. It’s a bid for connection. A search for meaning. Oliver Sacks said it well in “The Mind’s Eye,” a book inspired by his partial loss of vision: “Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.”

(Frank Bruni, “Writing With Your Eyes Closed,” NYTimes, 7-6-19)

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