Somewhere around the time my daughter was in middle school, she approached me with the question that signals a pre-adolescent's first tentative attempts at philosophical reasoning: "Mom, if you had to choose, would you rather be blind or deaf?" (To my knowledge, my daughter had not been reading The Autobiography of Helen Keller, the book that had first triggered this very same question in my own prepubescent mind. ) I did not take the bait, pointing out to my daughter that it was silly to spend time considering a choice that, besides being awful, was also pretty illogical. I told her that I would choose neither.
And yet, now that I am drawing ever closer to the territory that constitutes senior citizenhood, I have begun to consider the possibility that I could one day find myself either blind or deaf and that, should this happen, it will be with a total disregard for whatever my own personal preference happens to be.
So what would it be? And admit it, you've thought about this too - everybody does.
As you've probably figured out from some of my previous posts, music is pretty important to me. Before becoming a librarian, I studied music theory as an undergraduate and went on to get an M.A. in music history and theory. If I were to lose my hearing, I would have to confront the reality of life without Mozart; even just the thought of this has the ability to send me into a deep depression. For that reason alone, if I were given the choice, I would have to choose not to be deaf.
So, in that peculiar parallel universe that exists in the realm of my daughter's question, by choosing not to be deaf, I would be choosing to be blind. We all already have a sense of what that would be like - who among us has not ever deliberately closed their eyes to shut out the light? In another way, this is not totally unfamiliar territory to me; I have been seriously nearsighted for most of my life and required double cataract surgery when in my late forties, well ahead of the normal schedule for such things. Indeed, I am continuously grateful that it has been relatively easy to keep me visually functioning and able to read. My relationship with books, especially in recent years, has become equally as intense as my relationship with music.
So what am I trying to get at here? Am I running out of stuff to blog about and just rambling on in the hope that some of this might make any kind of sense?
We'll see. (To be continued)
