And There Was Light

by Jacques Lusseyran

  I can still see one of them, Jean-Pierre, in my first year at the lycée. But mostly I remember his coarse wool sweater and his big shoulders which seemed to me superhuman. Jean-Pierre had taken it into his head to see that I made good. Before, between and after classes he led me around the school or, I might say, waved me like a flag. He made all the boys invite me to join their games, and the ones who refused never tried it again. He taught me to run right behind him holding on to his neck. He said that was the best way.

  With Jean-Pierre ahead of me, there were no more dangers. If something unexpected came up, he took it all on himself. He almost thanked me for letting him hurt himself. Every day, he showed me off in the gym, the infirmary and the kitchen. And last of all we had to make our regular visit to the concierge, who was loud in support of Jean-Pierre.

  To the people who think I am seeing my childhood through rose-colored glasses, I say that is only because of their prejudice against childhood. Of course there are bad children, and I have been exposed to them. Sometimes I have lost a few feathers and come back wounded in my self-esteem. But more often than not there were the Jean-Pierres. I suppose that no real poet has ever had the mane of the real Pegasus in his hands. Still, at the age of ten, when I was holding on to the neck of Jean-Pierre, I was just such a poet. And I promise you I never doubted it.

  IT IS OFTEN HARD to persuade individuals, but it is impossible to persuade organizations, and the best thing to do is to accept the fact. What hope is there that a school, a committee, an administration or department, a group entrenched in routine, will look with favor on exceptions? If you are blind you are bound to be an exception, because you are not just like other people, and because you belong to a minority, though fortunately a small one.

  I had a chance to observe this again when I was ready to enter the lycée at the age of ten. I was admitted, but in the same way as two years earlier in the elementary school, on probation. They agreed to keep me if at the end of six months or a year I had demonstrated that I would not throw the train off the track. In October 1934, I was in my first year at the Lycée Montaigne, a building opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. Once I had passed beyond the administration and the door of the school, happily I had only individual men and not committees to deal with.

  Of the many teachers I knew, first at Montaigne and then at Louis-le-Grand, not one ever opposed my being there, and many encouraged it beyond the dictates of conscience in their profession. If I mention the teacher of natural history who, exasperated by the clicking of my typewriter, held it under running water to get back at me, I should add that he had to be placed in an institution three months later because of mental illness. In seven years at the lycée I never really had any injustice to bear. It would be fairer to say that I was put in the ranks with all the rest, accepted, encouraged, even honored.

  From this time on the story of my life is so like other people’s that it often becomes confused with them. And since the studies of a young Parisian in the second quarter of the twentieth century hold no mysteries, for the first time I find I have to choose. My chosen subject is blindness, and what can be accomplished with it. All the other details I shall pass by.

  I was bored at the lycée, bored almost all the time, and that was certainly not because of my companions or my teachers, but in spite of them. The boredom I am talking about was not the impatience of a child who wants to play instead of working (even though, naturally, I liked to play) nor the windiness of a mind which listens for five minutes, goes woolgathering, and then listens again. This process upsets conscientious children to the point of nausea, and throws those who are less tense into total mental sleep. I rarely fell asleep in class, at least no more often than my neighbors. I had a strong intellectual curiosity. Mathematics I did find dull, but Latin, Greek and German interested me, and literature, history, geography and the natural sciences made me feel as if I were visiting magic gardens. Lessons and homework, instead of tiring me, delighted me. I drank from the springs of knowledge as from a fountain. But all the same I was bored at school.

  As soon as the classroom door closed, the smell of the room went to my head. It was not that my classmates were dirty, but each of them had a body, and forty bodies shut up in a small space were too many. It was like standing at the edge of a stagnant marsh. But why should it be so?

  I HAVE ALREADY SAID that for blind people there is such a thing as moral odor, and I think that was the case at school. A group of human beings who stay in one room by compulsion — or because of social obligation which comes to the same thing — begins to smell. That is literally the case, and with children it happens even faster. Just think how much suppressed anger, humiliated independence, frustrated vagrancy and impotent curiosity can be accumulated by forty boys between the ages of ten and fourteen!

  So that was the source of the unpleasant odor and the smoke which, for me, was like a physical presence in class. What I saw there was confusion, colors were faded and even dirty. The blackboard was black, the floor was black, the tables were black and so were the books. Even the teacher, in terms of light, was no more than gray. To be otherwise he had to be remarkable, not only for what he knew (learning in those days gave me little light) but remarkable as a person as well.

  Boredom bound and gagged all my senses. Even sounds in class lost their volume and their depth and went lifeless. Every bit of my passion for living was needed to stand the test. At bottom I must have lacked discipline, not making up my mind to rebel, but still an incorrigible individualist. That was certainly part of my makeup, but then too there was blindness and its special world, to which school was doing violence. I had to wait years, at least until adolescence, to quiet the scandal which started inside my head at school. I doubt whether I have made peace with it even now.

  I couldn’t understand why the teachers never talked about the life going on inside them or inside us. They talked in great detail about the origin of mountains, the assassination of Julius Caesar, the properties of triangles, the way beetles reproduce and how often, and the combustion of carbon dioxide. Sometimes they even talked about men, but only as personages. There were the personages of ancient history, those of the Renaissance and of Molière’s comedies, or a personage stranger than all the others, the one they called “individual” or “citizen,” of whom I never had the slightest conception. There was never any talk of real people like the teacher or ourselves.

  As for the subject of all subjects, the fact that the world is not just outside us but also within, this was entirely lacking. I understood that the teacher could not or did not wish to talk about what was going on inside him. That was his affair, and after all I was not anxious myself to talk about what went on in me. But the inner life was so much more than a personal thing. There were a thousand desires and goals my companions shared with me, and I knew it. To accumulate knowledge was good and beautiful, but the reason for men to acquire it would have been more meaningful, and no one spoke of that.

  I could not help thinking that in the whole business someone was cheating somewhere. I felt I had to defend myself, and I did so by mobilizing all the images of my inner world, all the ones bound up with living creatures or living things. Sitting on my dark chair in front of my sickening table, under the gray downpour of learning, I set myself to weaving a kind of cocoon. Still, while I was a good boy I was sly, and managed it so that no one would guess I was hostile. This interior world of mine was so important to me that I was determined to protect it from shipwreck, and to rescue it I never stopped making concessions to the public, to books, to my parents and teachers. I owe my brilliance as a student to this rescue operation.

  In order to be left in peace I undertook to learn everything they wanted me to, Latin, entomology, geometry and the history of the Chaldeans. I learned to type on an ordinary typewriter so I could hand my homework directly to the teachers like the others. Every day I carried my Braille typewriter to school, and put it on a felt cushion to deaden the sound, and then I took my notes.
I listened, responded, listened, but was never in it heart and soul. As a boy I was cut in two. I was there and elsewhere, always going and coming between the important and the meaningless.

  Now that the experience is behind me — the boredom thick as oil, the moral curvature which lasted for years — I can see that I owe them something, as the sign that some vital spirit in me refused to turn its back on childhood, and would never admit that truth was ready-made. There was no going back on it. I would never relinquish the sense of wonder I felt when I went blind. Even if there were not a book in the world to record it, I should still feel it.

  WHATEVER THE DRAWBACKS, it was in school that I met my first allies: the poets and the gods. I found them in the dust of books and before me they opened avenues which were broad and bright. They seemed to be smiling on me and told me that all was not lost.

  It is more than likely that humanistic studies will disappear before long. But in 1935 in a lycée in Paris they were still solidly entrenched. Our work was divided into two approximately equal parts: the world of today and the world of yesterday, the dreams of the ancients and the dreams of modern man. I can’t believe that was a bad thing. At least we were not in danger of falling into the absurdity, so common nowadays, of confusing the era of Sputniks and Polaris rockets with the era of Genesis.

  For hours on end we were compelled to consort with personages or, if you prefer, with supernatural beings, with Jupiter and Venus, and with the mermaids and the elves; and then again with Jupiter, Prometheus, Vulcan, Apollo — a waste of time in terms of bookkeeping, a real bloodletting of learning and, for practical purposes, entirely foolish. Foolish it may have been, but who can prove it? As far as I am concerned I can assure you that it was a happy folly.

  At all events, from 1934 to 1939 my task as a student was to gather in and make a harmonious household of people belonging to categories as different as Newton and Minerva, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Léon Blum, Adolf Hitler, Hercules and Neptune. The remarkable thing was that this odd mixture somehow resulted in a little more light.

  I myself could see more clearly and knew more about myself, for inside me also the universe existed not just in two dimensions but in three. It revolved in the present but also in the past, revealing itself in the visible and the invisible, in things we can weigh and in others we cannot weigh; in things which bear a name which one can study in their elements or create, and not less in the process of change.

  There was a vast agitation inside my head, a continuous fermentation, like a number of liquids poured into the same vessel and shaken up, but still lying one on top of another in neatly separated layers. It was Adolf Hitler who fell to the bottom and Apollo who rose to the top.

  Everything I learned from Greek mythology, and through its long line of inheritance from Homer to Giraudoux by way of Racine, seemed clear. Yet this was the kind of evidence I had the hardest time explaining, especially when I had to write a theme. The Greek gods pleased me and were even important to me. Their way of behaving was almost always like a burlesque, and shocking. I remember that when I was twelve, the infidelities of Jupiter to Juno nearly made me hate him. I completely disapproved of him but still, behind those intimacies of the bedchamber and all the inane quarrels, the gods took on substance. And what they conveyed coincided almost exactly with what I was experiencing myself. Minerva, for instance, was wisdom, Venus beauty, Apollo light and Jupiter lightning, force, radiance, protection. For my part, I knew very well that these things existed, were not merely puppets or words, not just occasions of misunderstanding in the Latin.

  The way adults said “this is beautiful,” “that is reasonable” annoyed me, because I could see that, for them, “this” and “that” counted far more than “beautiful” or “reasonable.” They were concerned only with things they needed right away, with things they used. I was not anxious to make use of things, anyway not yet. I just wanted to look at them.

  I liked Apollo better than all the rest. I had definite reasons for my preference, because Apollo was the only one the books talked about for whom light was as important as it was for me. Besides, the particular responsibility of this great god was the part of light I knew to be essential — namely its source. He was less concerned with the way light strikes against objects all over the planet (this was good enough for the science of optics) than with its birth and rebirth, and the mystery which made it flow through everything inexhaustibly. Later on I understood that Apollo was not the only one nor even the best, that Jesus had considered light essential, and that it was one of the vital elements in the Christian mystique. But when I was eleven, Apollo was the one who spoke to me most clearly.

  And then there were the poets, those unbelievable people so different from other men, who told anyone who would listen that a wish is more important than a fortune, and that a dream can weigh more than iron or steel. What nerve they had, those poets, but how right they were! Everything, they said, comes from inside us, passes through things outside and then goes back in. And that to them is the meaning of life, feeling, understanding, love.

  Most of the time the poets were obscure — too much so for my taste — because of the wretched language they used, language which rose and fell endlessly, held you suspended to the point where, at the end of a few minutes, you could no longer hear them; a language which shimmered, bounded from one end of the universe to the other, called attention to something, then immediately replaced it by its opposite. Sometimes I suspected the poets of only adding fruitless complexities to their lives. But all the same they knew a great deal.

  Speaking of complexity, three or four years later it was my turn to beat the record. When I was about fifteen I wrote poems as stormy and obscure as any you can imagine. I described gardens and fantastic grottoes. I made all the words in the dictionary knock their heads together, all the stars in the firmament run into each other, as I feel sure every man worth his salt must have done at some time in his life.

  But the strange thing is that today, when I have become much more reasonable and more prudent, I often feel an unconquerable desire for the disorder of an earlier day as I have described it. Granted it was a mass of confusion, but at bottom luminous and containing more germs of life within the space of a single minute than there are in my happier days in the present.

  At the lycée, when a friend, one of the “practical ones,” asked one of us “visionaries” what a certain verse in Virgil or Victor Hugo meant, we had the answer ready-made. “It means what it means, and something more! Can’t you see?” Most of the time he did not see, but he had something with which to console himself. He could always treat us as fools.

  A VERY SHORT TIME after I went blind I forgot the faces of my mother and father and the faces of most of the people I loved. From time to time I remembered a face, but it was always that of a person I did not care about. Why did memory work that way? It was almost as if affection were not compatible with it.

  Could it be that affection, or love, puts us so close to people that we are no longer able to evoke their image? Perhaps we never see those we love, never completely, just because we love them. In the absence of their faces I had the voices of my parents ever present in my ears, and since the accident the shape of people and their appearance still concerned me, but in a different way. All at once I stopped caring whether people were dark or fair, with blue eyes or green. I felt that sighted people spent too much time observing these empty things. Every cliché of colloquial talk, “he inspires confidence,” “he is well brought up,” seemed to me superficial, the froth but not the drink itself.

  For my part I had an idea of people, an image, but not the same as the one seen by the world at large. Often I saw them in a way diametrically opposed to that of others. The furtive boy I saw as shy, the one they called lazy as struggling all day long in imagination with an ardor which was the opposite of laziness. To tell the truth, my opinions of people had become so different that I often distrusted them. I ended by feeling that I was the one who was stran
ge.

  Frankly, hair, eyes, mouth, the necktie, the rings on fingers mattered very little to me. I no longer even thought about them. People no longer seemed to possess them. Sometimes in my mind men and women appeared without heads or fingers. Then again the lady in the armchair suddenly rose before me in her bracelet, turned into the bracelet itself. There were people whose teeth seemed to fill their whole faces, and others so harmonious they seemed to be made of music. But in reality none of these sights is made to be described. They are so mobile, so much alive that they defy words.

  People were not at all as they were said to be, and never the same for more than two minutes at a stretch. Some were, of course, but that was a bad sign, a sign that they did not want to understand or be alive, that they were somehow caught in the glue of some indecent passion. That kind of thing I could see in them right away, because, not having their faces before my eyes, I caught them off guard. People are not accustomed to this, for they only dress up for those who are looking at them.

  I heard my parents’ voices against my ear or inside my heart, where you will, but very close. And all the other voices followed the same course. It is comparatively easy to protect ourselves from a face we dislike; sufficient to keep it at a distance, to leave it in the world outside. But only try the same thing with voices, you will never manage it!

  The human voice forces its way into us. It is really inside ourselves that we hear it. To hear it properly we must allow it to vibrate in our heads and our chests, in our throats as if, for the moment, it really belonged to us. That is surely the reason why voices never deceive us.