Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

by Sanford D. Greenberg

  The reception was held in a lovely garden adjacent to the synagogue. Arthur sang beautifully. There was lots of dancing. As the band played the “Horah,” the guests lifted Sue and me up on chairs and bounced us up and down until we got dizzy. Then they picked up my mother and father and twirled them around, then Sue’s parents. The old-timers smiled and probably wondered how they had arrived at this point.

  I thought about how far we had come. Not so many years earlier, Sue was a girl I desperately wanted to know. We were still kids now, but initiated and anointed and ready to start our real lives. I was going to be in school, with a certain handicap, and she was going to be working and helping me out. We did not have firm ideas about what we were going to do in the long term, but we hoped it would be something important, something great. I knew I was going to be with the person for whom I felt an unlimited, unabashed love.

  After our wedding, Sue and I moved into an apartment at 19 Wendell Street in Cambridge, a tiny fourth-floor walk-up barely large enough for the furniture we had scraped together. Sue began working at a school for special-needs kids, some of whom were children of Harvard professors.

  There was a great deal of apprehension among us new grad students as classes began. They were taught by men and women of enormous accomplishment. Those in my field, government, had all consulted with the White House at various times. One, a famous figure during the Vietnam War period and now thought of by many people as a war criminal, was a criminal in at least one sense. He borrowed my tape recorder to use for a book he was writing—and broke it. I spent a lot of money to replace it. Eventually, after plenty of prodding on my part, he compensated me for the loss, but without an apology. Another professor—Louis Hartz, the great theorist on American politics—became so excited during his lecture one day that at its conclusion he slumped over the lectern in exhaustion.

  The Cuban missile crisis boiled up while I was at Harvard. I first got wind of the whole terrifying episode not from radio or television but from a professor of government, Richard Neustadt, another of my Columbia mentors who had moved on to Harvard. He was always professorial-looking—tweed jacket and pipe, very neat. He stood totally erect, as if he were a Roman orator, and all that was important to him lay not just in the Forum but in the heavens. I was walking across campus one day when, as usual, he stopped to chat. This time he seemed distracted. There was no pipe. He told me he had just gotten back from Washington, where he had been meeting with President Kennedy, and that things were not going well there. I asked him what was wrong. He only said that I should stay close to the television for the next few days.

  I recall being uneasy following that chance meeting. That night the TV commentators were talking about what might turn out to be the end of the world. There was deep anxiety, even fear of the catastrophic. Yet in the back of most people’s minds was the hope, the belief that the president was in control and knew what to do. We had parked our missiles in Turkey, and now the Soviets had theirs in Cuba.

  There were otherwise both good and terribly bleak days for us in Cambridge. It is a rare thing to be among brilliant people all the time, to study under them—and I believe even rarer among students to appreciate the privilege as fully as I think I did. And then there were the friendships I made with the people who read to me, many of whom would go on to do great things in their fields.

  On the downside was the little money we had, even with the generous support of our parents. Luckily, with fellowships and scholarships, I was soon earning most of what we needed. Of course, I practically had to kill myself to keep up the necessary grades (no mulligans for blind boys). And there was always the interminable work: the hours spent at night—when I ought to have been sleeping—learning all that I could, not only about my coursework but about my thesis topic, which was South Africa. I pored over history books and entire encyclopedias on the country.

  The bleakest day of all—among the bleakest in American history—was November 22, 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy affected every one of us profoundly. He had represented everything good about the country. To my mind, he also seemed to be someone I could strive to emulate. Now, that role model, like my vision, was gone. A double loss.

  The days would go like this: wake at six; listen to tapes; prepare for class; see Sue off to school; listen to tapes; go to class; meet with readers (morning, noon, and night); talk to professors or classmates walking to and from class, with or without the help of a guide; eat a light lunch (often enough, a tuna sandwich); more classes; walk across the quad, lugging the tape recorder; nick my shins or elbows or knees; arrive home and listen to tapes; wait for Sue to arrive home; arrange things as tidily as possible; fail at this effort, or succeed only marginally; keep listening to tapes from the classes; take a few minutes to consider the world and the perils of the future.

  When Sue returned in the evening, she would throw down her stuff, let out a long breath, and begin to cook dinner, something simple and filling. We would talk for a bit, then eat. After that, I would continue with my tapes while she looked over her students’ work. We were too tired to talk much. Visitors would often come over after dinner to read to me, and Sue would entertain them for a while as well. Sometimes they had dinner with us, and then our awkward silence would temporarily disappear.

  Then we slept. In the morning, the same routine began.

  Out of my own necessity, I also invented, and later patented, a compressed-speech machine that speeds up the reproduction of words from recordings without distorting any sound so that anyone who needs to absorb large amounts of recorded speech can listen to two to three hundred words or more in a minute. An ordinary tape playback could only reproduce one hundred fifty words per minute.

  As Professor Cantor had recommended, I applied for a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford University. It was a scholarly thing to do, as well as prestigious, and I needed all the prestige and scholarship I could find in those humbling days. What would become of us after the conclusion of my studies at Harvard was uncertain. My experience and heritage seemed to require that I anticipate misfortune. Any advantage might help, and the Marshall selection committee thankfully obliged.

  Sue’s and my parents came to the dock to see us off to England. As we walked up the gangway, waving goodbye, Sue wept. But she was still young, and her spirit was too strong to be down for long. She did not know what misery lay ahead in England. Nor did I.

  At Oxford, I was to continue working on my doctoral thesis on South Africa, following which I would return to Harvard to complete my work for the degree. Owing to the generosity of one of the professors at Oxford, I was given a gigantic office in the Bodleian Library to accommodate my many readers—an unprecedented gesture. Most faculty members did not have offices that large.

  The Bodleian is the second-largest library in England, containing, among many other wonderful things, a complete set of Shakespeare’s first folios. The library’s holdings of letters and correspondence comprise “the sentences of gods,” as a graduate student in Victorian English, one of my readers, expressed it to me. She was openly envious that I had my own workspace in the library. I admitted that I was lucky to be situated among so much of the collected brilliance of the world—as if its brilliance would drip off onto me. It was a bitter-cold brilliance, however. The library was frigid, offering nothing that could be detected in the way of physical heat. Cold makes me sleepy. Every single day I had the urge to flip the hood of my jacket up and lay my head on the table. In fact, what I remember most about England is that cold: Sue and I huddled up in our little rented apartment, the to-and-fro to the library, everywhere. It was the kind of cold you cannot imagine ever being able to shake off. And I grew up in Buffalo!

  At one point, we ran out of money entirely and could no longer afford to heat our own little rented rooms. Not long after that we were hit with a triple whammy, part of it weather related. Sue came down with a burning pneumonia. Meanwhile, I found an odd lump emerging from the side of my face. In additi
on, complications from my previous eye surgeries had to be dealt with. All three problems required medical attention, and so we made an emergency trip home. I went on to Detroit for eye surgery before we returned to the country that sunshine seemed to have forgotten.

  Eventually, Oxford wore me down. I had never thought of myself as pampered, but the winter cold was unrelenting, and the omnipresent hard surfaces were a constant threat to a blind graduate student trying to feel his way around an unfamiliar campus. Even so, I would never trade away that experience. Study at Oxford taught me, sometimes with gleeful nastiness, to seek precision in words. That in turn entailed an unrelenting pursuit of precision in thought, which in turn demanded accurately limned perception of the facts and clear, logical reasoning, all of which has been a priceless gift in disparate realms, from government and business to philanthropy and my personal thoughts. Oxford also provided us with a few memories that warm me still: the lovely English spring, mornings and evenings on Christ Church Meadow, rowing and punting on the Thames.

  Following our return from England, we spent a brief period back in Cambridge so I could finish up my studies and present my thesis. The oral exams for my doctorate were presided over by the world-renowned scholar Carl Friedrich, and they were intellectually violent. The one man among the panel whom I thought would be my advocate, Rupert Emerson, had been a kind, supportive adviser. But that day he treated me as if I were on trial at Nuremberg. It was as if my past three years studying political theory, international affairs, international economics, American government, and constitutional law meant very little. It was not that I did not know the answers—it was as if the questions were not really being put to me as questions. They were more like accusations.

  I finished the orals and went outside. All I remember, for some reason, was my right hand touching my left hand, as if to make sure my limbs were still there. I do not think I had ever experienced such an intellectual assault—and I had experienced many.

  Afterward, I felt like a wake would be appropriate, but Sue and I had anticipated an easier time, and we had already agreed to meet good friends for lunch at a restaurant on Brattle Street called the Window Shoppe. The name was appropriate; it had always been a place to look in but never to enter. For us, it represented Yankee gentility. It was not so much that we could not afford to dine there (although we couldn’t); it was more that we did not belong there, maybe today most of all. But our friends had insisted on treating us, and so off we went.

  Bernard Shapiro, a Canadian who was working on his PhD in education, was one of my readers, and he and his wife, Phyllis, had become fast friends of ours. We would have them over for Passover seders, and they had us over many times as well. Phyllis, an exuberant woman, was always outgoing, always “on.” Bernard cared deeply about providing education; he had graduated from McGill and would eventually become its president, or “principal” as that position is officially known. The Shapiros were a few years older than Sue and I, and it was nice to have been taken under their wing.

  They greeted us at an outside table. I was still shaken. I felt no anticipated wave of euphoria, just headachy and tired, and I think Sue knew it. She told me to behave, that these were our friends and it was a special occasion. I do not recall what we talked about. They wanted to know how my trial went. I don’t remember much about the food, just that I was sitting next to a white trellis, freshly painted, clean. The lunch concluded, and we all hugged. They congratulated me, and Sue and I went home.

  I think we straightened up the apartment a bit, although I’m not sure why. Finally, I told her that I was exhausted and was going to sleep. I recall that being the deepest and most rewarding sleep I had ever had. It was like being dead, and being dead was terrific. I was several fathoms down. There was no sense of time or place, no dreams, just the vague comfort of knowing that I was finished, that I was warm, that I was somehow released, at least for the time being, from burden. Time passed. Sue slept next to me. She was warm, and that, as always, felt very good.

  At around nine o’clock in the evening the phone in the other room started to ring. It must have been ringing a long time before I heard it. I do not know where Sue was; perhaps she was as deeply asleep as I. I remember being annoyed that she had not gotten up to answer the phone. I got up and ran for it, slamming my head into a projecting corner. Blood came out in spurts, splattering the walls, drenching me. At that, Sue woke up. She must have put a towel or cloth to my head, which did little to stop the bleeding. We knew the drill; we went to the Harvard health center. While we waited, even amid all the blood (it was hard to imagine that the human body could produce so much), I remember thinking that it was actually a pretty nice facility. The walls had a newly painted smell. I was eventually patched up, and we left at around four in the morning.

  I didn’t know it at the time because I hadn’t been able to answer the phone, but I had my PhD. Stitches and all, I was now Dr. Sanford D. Greenberg, the crowning achievement of an educational odyssey that seemed (in my fevered memory) to have endured as many challenges as that famous odyssey chronicled by Homer 2,500 years ago.

  Far more important to me, I had also found the opportunity along the way to begin reimbursing Arthur for his endless kindness.

  Sue and I were still in Oxford when I got a call from Arthur, who was now in architecture school. “Sandy, I’m really unhappy. I don’t like being in architecture school. I don’t like doing this.”

  “So what is it you want to do?” I asked.

  “I really love to sing,” he said. “You remember my high-school friend Paul, the guy who plays the guitar? We want to try our hand in the music business, but in order to do that, I have to have $400.” This was in 1964—$400 was a lot of money then. In fact, Sue and my entire savings amounted to just over that amount, but I sent the money off to Arthur immediately. What else could I possibly have done?

  PART 3

  Tikkun

  Olam

  14

  The Start of Something Big

  After gaining my doctorate, I set my sights on a law degree. I applied to Harvard and was accepted. This was the path I had wanted to follow all along. It was woven throughout my mentality and had been since I had become aware, from the experience of my family, of where the perversion of law might lead. It also began to dawn on me that if I had gone straight to law school, I would have missed the intellectual excitement of the last several years. I was beginning to see the advantages of my turn in the road.

  In the meantime, Arthur had been paying us visits in Cambridge, driving up from New York City on his motorcycle. One time he took off its front wheel to keep it from getting stolen and put it in our apartment bathtub. He thought this was reasonable. When Sue came home, she was not happy about it, and she let him know.

  Those demanding years in Cambridge and Oxford may suggest that I was suffering from a kind of compulsion. I was. For what reason did it all have to be done with such urgency? It would have been reasonable in everyone’s eyes for me to have taken my time about it, or to have foregone one or two of my degrees.

  But I was bitten by some kind of bug. Once someone gets his or her resolve up and running, and gets it focused in a direction, it is hard to put on the brakes. In a word, there is momentum. Also, aggressive work habits form. For us blind people, it is especially hard to hold back because we are always concerned about security. Like those who survived and prospered long after the Great Depression but could never shake the habit of stockpiling food and cash for a rainy day, we never feel comfortable, in our guts, about sitting back and saying, “Okay, that’s it. I’ve done enough.”

  So there was this hunger, but a hunger for what precisely? Surely not security alone, for even after Columbia I might have gotten decent employment of some sort. I have devoted a lot of thought to this question over the years, and I have come to realize that I had an endless hunger for ideas. Living an informed life within the mind, a mind in which thoughts proliferate and assemble, requires a steady diet of t
hought. The busyness in my mind, in the so-called darkness, is undisturbed by the constant flow of visual sense images. Picture thoughts as stars; during the daytime, sunlight obscures them. But not for me. When I listen to music, for example, my mind is at the ready—ready to be surprised and delighted by every note, every chord. This is one of the compensations for the loss of eyesight.

  At Harvard, I had studied political science with Stanley Hoffmann, the author of many books on international politics and American foreign policy and later the founder of Harvard’s Center for European Studies. At Oxford, I had the good fortune to come under the spell of Sir Arthur Goodhart. Sir Arthur, an American who had been granted an honorary British knighthood, was investigating how, in the post–World War II era, world leaders might create effective international legal institutions.

  Surrounding those two scholars—and there were many, many others—lay a realm of ideas of the very highest importance for mankind. Within the work of these scholars shone, among other things, the nature of the rule of law. That central concept of today’s liberal democracies is, on the one hand, a term of art, an abstraction within the scholar’s field of study. On the other hand, the rule of law, built on principles of justice, is far from theoretical. It underlay the very real and practical salvation of my family.

  After a half century of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only really worthwhile things in the world are people and ideas. That is why the Western intellectual tradition, the tradition for which the Parthenon stands as a symbol, has meant more to me than merely collecting an array of intellectual concepts. It is the substance of that work, the collective force of the content, that has helped save me from slumping on a porch in the western New York hinterlands.