Sometimes I’m staring at this white box sitting against a ridiculously ugly shade of purple, and the need to write is burning me so badly that I’m shaking when I’m not typing. At any rate, because tonight proved ill for inspiration, this is a quick outline of one of my favorite short stories. It was written by C.S. Lewis, entitled “The Man Born Blind”, found in the compilation The Dark Tower.

A boy was born blind, but through the miracle of modern medicine, he gains his sight back.

Trying to get used to the world of seeing really screws him up. What messes with him the most however, is trying to understand the concept of light.

I have to quote this directly because I have to:

“You see, you won’t say. Nobody will say. You tell me the light is here and the light is there, and this is in the light and that is in the light, and yesterday you told me I was in your light, and now you say that light is a bit of yellow wire in a glass bulb hanging from the ceiling. Call that light? Is that was Milton was talking about? What are you crying about? If you don’t know what light is, why can’t you say so? If the operation has been a failure and I can’t see properly after all, tell me. If there’s no such thing — if it was all a fairy tale from the beginning — tell me. But for God’s sake…”

(pp. 100-101)

He sometimes closes his eyes and feels around as if he was blind just so he can feel normal again.

One morning, he’s out for a walk, and he approaches a painter standing at the edge of a cliff, trying to capture the morning fog in the depths below.

The painter says to him about the sunlight shining off the fog: Won’t you look at that? Pure light, I tell you, solid light that you could drink in a cup or bathe in.

The boy is ecstatic at the discovery of light. The boy steps off the edge of the cliff to hug this solid light, and the story ends with this line:

“From beneath a new-made and rapidly vanishing figt in the fog there came up no cry but only a sound so sharp and definite that you would hardly expect it to have been made by the fall of something so soft as a human body; that, and the rattling of some loosened stones.”

(p. 103)

This is the kind of story I love the most, beautiful in the same way a glass vase in your backyard is after you break it and let the pieces glint in the sun. Go nab the book somewhere and read that one story real quick, if you can.

Okay, not shaking anymore. Hopefully this diary will be back on track at some point.