Borges Blindness And Dillard's Seeing
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. …show more content…
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 see the world. Conciously vebalizing objects forces you to take in the object’s characteristics, instead of casually noting them. Dillard also states “unless I call my atention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it" furthering the idea that seeing something is when someone uses everything they know and relates it to what they are looking at. In this way, someone can actually see nature instead of just look at it. But once a blind person learns to visualize objects without using her sight, it’s almost impossible for a person who regains his sight to associate objects with different color blobs. As an example she states that "I couldn't unpeach the peaches" (4). Throughout her story, Dillard seems to see a supernatural side to nature that may only be seen while
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. …show more content…
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 see the world. Conciously vebalizing objects forces you to take in the object’s characteristics, instead of casually noting them. Dillard also states “unless I call my atention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it" furthering the idea that seeing something is when someone uses everything they know and relates it to what they are looking at. In this way, someone can actually see nature instead of just look at it. But once a blind person learns to visualize objects without using her sight, it’s almost impossible for a person who regains his sight to associate objects with different color blobs. As an example she states that "I couldn't unpeach the peaches" (4). Throughout her story, Dillard seems to see a supernatural side to nature that may only be seen while