Borges’ Blindness & Dillard’s Seeing
In Jorge Luis Borges’ piece from Ficciones, “Blindness” and Annie Dillard’s piece from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “Seeing”, we read writers’ perspectices on their own blindness. The writers contradict the common fallacies our culture has about blindness with their own personal experiences. Although both writers portray blindness in a positive light, each writer uses his disability to enhance his lives differently. Borges depicts his loss of sight as an opportunity to learn new things about life and himself, while Dillard uses her blindness as a way to better appreciate nature. Jorge Luis Borges gives his perspective as a blind man who orginally could see but lost his sight due to an inherited disease. Borges positive attitude toward his blindness allowed him to explore different ideas he wouldn’t have considered with his sight. He states that "since I have lost the beloved world of appearance, I must create something else" (2). For Jorge, this "something else" was to learn about different literatures. With some of his students, he began to read the Anglo-Saxon Reader and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Even though he had "lost the visible world," Borges was going to "recover anthoner" (2). With this idea in mind, Borges not only learned about Anglo-Saxon, but also more about Scandanavian literature. Blindness to Borges was motivation to become better at literature. He cites many writers, such as Milton,
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Edgar Allen Poe, and even himself, that do some of their best work while being blind. He urges people to realize that "blindness should be seen as a way of like: one of the styles of living" (5). Dillard looked at blindness from a different perspective: being blind your whole life, then suddenly being able to see again. She felt that when you're blind you are able to pay more attention to nature. A blind person can "analyze and pry" life (5). Dillard claims that this is necessary in order to truly...
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