Blindness, The Solitude Of The Country: Jorge Borges And Samuel Johnson

Blindness/the Solitude of the Country

Jorge Borges and Samuel Johnson were over a century apart and still managed to share similar ideas and views about the world, besides from being two of my favorite writers from the Art of the Personal Essay. I noticed a similarity in both writers. Samuel and Jorge both shared a unique sense of writing style; both having been infatuated with poetry and literature is what I believe to be the connection between the fictional essays they both so humbly wrote. Reading about life and death; made me ask myself, Am I living life; or just living? The points they make in their stories are to me very clear and very interesting. These two writers not only wrote about life but captured the audience’s attention doing so.
Samuel Johnson writes about two different kinds of people in the world, those who are selfish and those who know nothing about life.
Borges, a man whose life was changing dramatically was going thru the process of finding his own identity, to Borges the love of books was his path to discovering the differences that lie ahead for him were actually gifts. As I began rereading the stories of Johnson and Borges, I realized the passion and courage they both shared for their lives and the lives of others. Although their lives were completely different, they both shared the same views. Life is not always as it seems, you have to trample the bad with the good and keep moving forward. We all have obstacles to overcome and understanding one another is the first step. Both writers believed that we are all here for a reason; we have to help each other and leave a piece of our individuality for the next generation to
progress.

Borges was a well educated man with a love for books, spending most of his time in the library he began to notice that three of the library’s directors had been blind, he told himself “two is a mere coincidence; three a confirmation”. He was sure god was making this happen and had a plan for those who directed the library. As Jorge got older he became the new library director, coincidentally he started to lose his sight as well. He inherited a form of color blindness from his father and grandfather. He was unable to see the color red anymore and the color white became a gray vision to him.

Little by little he came to realize the strange irony of events. He had always imagined paradise to be a kind of library and there he was barely able to make out the titles and the words on the pages of the nine hundred thousand books he had watched over. Borges found himself writing a poem about the two gifts he was given; only those two gifts contradicted each other. Poem of the gifts was what it was called. “No one should read self-pity or reproach into this statement of the majesty of god; who with such splendid irony granted me books and blindness at one touch”. This great piece of writing here shows the bravery and intellect Borges had and how focused he stood no matter what life threw at him.

Life to Borges was just beginning; he had a new language to learn, since his eyes started to fail him, he was left to explore a new kind of language, a language that was not only tangible but able to slow his relationship down with the words, to him; he was no longer blind, for he was able to imagine the words one by one and was not intimidated by the darkness. “I did not allow blindness to intimidate me, being blind has its advantages, I replaced the visual words with the sound of my new language”. Jorge soon found an outlet in studying foreign languages, more specifically the Anglo-Saxons. He filled his head with the knowledge and experiences of these great writers.

Among those great writers were Oscar Wilde and Homer, Borges believed that Oscar had a curious hypothesis about Homer, and wasn’t sure he believe it to be historically correct; he did however believe it to be intellectually agreeable. Wilde had believed that antiquity had deliberately characterized Homer to be blind and was not convinced that Homer ever existed. Tradition says that a great blind poet named Homer wrote the Iliad and Odyssey, history believes that Homer is really not one man but a group of poets; I believe that’s what fascinated Jorge.

In the time of Samuel Johnson, he was a great doctor who repeatedly suggested that we learn to understand one another and pay our debts to society. In his essay he differentiates between the two kinds of people in the world, he sets aside every race, color and gender, and looks within the people and says, “There are those who are intelligent but selfish and those who are dull and have no clue as to who they are in this world”. The people he refers to are those who live life in solitude taking what they can from life never repaying it back, and the ignorant people who know no god and no rules. To Samuel, the world is unbalanced; he wishes that everyone would stop living life selfishly and unite to grow as a people instead of a monster.

“Greatness is nothing where it is not seen”. What Samuel meant was that the religious people isolate themselves to the country having all this intellect and knowledge about a greater world and yet refuses to share it with those who live in the city. The city is soon looked as an evil place that is infected with sin, sin being lust, addictions, danger, drugs and so on. Samuel believes even if the place is said to be hell; the people of god should be courageous enough to at least try to save them from eternal damnation. Though Samuel is not a religious man he has a vast respect for people who are, he acknowledges the great people who live in solitude but considers that if they are alone for a long period of time; they will soon get lazy or believe every idea is genius because they have no one to reflect their ideas on.

The thoughts and ideas of these great essayists were not the only similarities between them. As I was comparing the two writers; I decided to research who they really were to get a sense of why these stories were written. I was well aware of the disability or should I say the gift that Jorge Borges had, I did not however know that Samuel Johnson was disabled as well. According to my research “As a baby his mother did not have enough milk for him, and so he was put out to nurse. From his nurse he contracted a tubercular infection called scrofula, which inflamed the lymph glands and spread to the optic and auditory nerves, leaving him deaf in the left ear, almost blind in the left eye, and dim of vision in the right eye. It also left scar tissue which disfigured his face, as did a later childhood bout with small-pox”.

Samuel Johnson and Jorge Borges both had many reasons to give up, but they were both determined to continue to live as if they were healthy people. Samuel and Jorge responded to their disabilities by a fierce willpower to be independent and to accept help and pity from no one. Despite the fact that both these men have many things in common, they are also very different. Samuel is known to be a moral essayist; the moral essay speaks directly of issues of character, courage, compassion, loyalty, truthfulness, and so on. Borges being a more modern writer had a different perspective on things; he would gather his inspiration from books; rather than experience. Nevertheless I believe they were both great people who left behind great stories that truly inspire us all.