I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty-two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity can do strange things to people. It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn’t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believe in it so deeply, otherwise. I don’t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.

Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me——a potential to live , you might call it—— which I didn’t see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.

4岁那年在大西洋城，我从货场一辆棚车上摔下来，头先着地，于是双目失明。现在我已经32岁了，还模糊地记得阳光是多么灿烂，红色是多么鲜艳。能恢复视觉固然好，但灾难也能对人产生奇妙的作用。有一天，我突然想到，倘若我不是盲人，或许不会变得像现在这样生活，但我不能肯定如果自己不盲，会不会像现在这样深信。这并不是所我宁愿成为盲人，我的意思是失去视力使我更加珍惜自己其他方面的能力了。

我认为，生活要求人不断地自我调整以适应现实。人愈能及时主动地进行调整，他的个人世界便越有意义。调整绝非易事，我也曾感到茫然、感到害怕。但我很幸运，父母和老师在我身上发现了某种东西——可以称之为“顽强的生命力”把——而我自己却没有发现，他们激励我与失明拼搏到底。