‘The Country of the Blind’ Review: Journey Into Darkness

In H.G. Wells’s 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind,” an explorer tumbles into a remote mountain valley that has been home to 15 generations of blind residents. They are so thoroughly and contentedly adapted to sightlessness that they cannot imagine what vision entails. Andrew Leland borrows the story’s title for his engaging memoir about living with degenerative eye disease. “Unlike Wells’s character, who escapes in the end,” he writes, “I’m here to stay, slowly becoming a naturalized citizen.”

Mr. Leland, now 42, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa as a college freshman. An inherited eye disease with no cure, RP often emerges in youth as night blindness; increasingly limited peripheral vision means that most people with RP are legally blind by middle age. But the condition is notable for its gradualness: There’s no decisive moment of “going blind,” just the ongoing process of “becoming blind.” Mr. Leland retains just 6% of his visual field, and doesn’t know how much longer his residual central vision will stick around.

As Mr. Leland points out, blindness is often an in-between condition. Only 15% of blind people have no light perception at all. For most blind people, who can see to varying extents, thinking of oneself as blind is prompted as much by mental shifts as by physical changes—at some point, Mr. Leland had to decide that he was blind. He now believes blindness is neither “biological fact” or “social construct” but “somewhere in between these two extremes.”

Across 10 chapters in “The Country of the Blind,” the author, a writer and podcast producer, weaves his personal experience into a cultural history of blindness that touches on topics including masculinity, race, religion, art and the disability rights movement. He tells the reader that, to research this book, he wanted to go wherever “blindness intersects with contemporary life.” Still, the most memorable parts of his account are intimate moments of pure autobiography.

When he uses his cane in public for the first time, for instance, it’s on a night of bar-hopping, with the dual protection of darkness and drunkenness. He describes holding it “like a giant fountain pen, doodling on the pavement.” Readers are privy to a host of other life events: passing the tests that qualify him for legal blindness; shakily cutting his son’s umbilical cord, worried that he’ll miss his target; learning which genetic mutation is responsible for his RP. He retires from driving in his early 30s, and from reading printed books a few years later. This new life sometimes feels like “one long troubleshooting session,” he writes. After studying braille for two laborious years, he tries to read a braille picture book to his enthusiastic first-grader. They don’t make it through the book before bedtime.

In this case as in others, Mr. Leland offers his own experience as a bridge between the blind and sighted worlds. He notes that “talking books,” designed to increase blind people’s access to literature, have existed since the mid-1930s. And it was blind technologists in the early ’90s who first developed EPUB, now a widely used ebook format. It’s not clear, though, whether a world of virtual affordances for the blind will immediately improve their lives.

With the advent of screen reading, the author notes, fewer blind people are learning braille. Many “braille evangelists”—including some of blind professionals—warn of today’s students becoming, “in a technical sense, illiterate.” Underneath the surface of this debate lies an uncomfortable truth about educational disparities: More than a fifth of Americans with a visual disability don’t finish high school, double the rate of sighted Americans, and Mr. Leland recognizes that, with a blind unemployment rate of 70%, “holding a full-time job, any job, is a minority position among the blind.” He wonders how the logistics of his day-to-day as a journalist will change as his vision erodes.

Blindness, Mr. Leland writes, is at once “central and incidental in a person’s life.” He can still navigate independently by foot—he just has to take into consideration factors he never did previously. He is the same person he was before losing his sight, and he is not. Somewhat less informatively, he argues that “we all live with this sort of ambiguity” in various aspects of life; he suggests his blindness, which doesn’t entail the complete loss of his sight, can be compared to a divorce that doesn’t completely sever a connection between exes. Elsewhere, he likens becoming disabled to unwillingly joining a club. Next, the same zoom-out: “But it’s also a basic feature of contemporary life: you may not like your family, but that’s another club you can’t leave.” The book is best when it doesn’t feel obliged to universalize, but stays with Mr. Leland’s particular journey into blindness.

By the end of “The Country of the Blind,” Mr. Leland has overcome the earlier shame that delayed his adoption of a cane. But as the cane becomes part of his daily life, he also becomes more aware of how people react to the ubiquitous signal of blindness: pedestrians cross to the other side of the street, parents “yank their children aside when I’m still half a block away.” For Mr. Leland, each stranger becomes a potential adversary, capable of condemning him to social isolation. “This is no way to move through the world,” he realizes. He now pairs his cane with a “half smile,” which—to those strangers inevitably watching—lends him an air of approachability. More important, taking control of how he is seen as he moves through the world reminds him to have patience, with others and himself: “I’m restored to the status of one person encountering another, ‘with equanimity and friendliness.’ ” To borrow a refrain from the book, he has learned to fail with grace—a lesson that, by virtue of its specificity, can’t help but take on broader resonance.

Ms. Shang is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal.