None So Blind

According to the 'Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings' this proverb has been traced back to (John Heywood), and resembles the.
Table of contents

Things began to converge. At the age of thirteen, Cletus had noted that the brain used more cells collecting, handling, and storing visual images than it used for all the other senses combined.

There are none so blind - phrase meaning and origin

When a baritone saxophone player has to transpose sheet music from cello, he few women are drawn to the instrument merely pretends that the music is written in treble clef rather than bass, eyeballs it up an octave, and then plays without the octave key pressed down. It's so simple a child could do it, if a child wanted to play such a huge, ungainly instrument. As his eye dances along the little fenceposts of notes, his fingers automatically perform a one-to-one transformation that is the theoretical equivalent of adding and subtracting octaves, fifths, and thirds, but all of the actual mental work is done when he looks up in the top right corner of the first page and says, "Aw hell.

But the eye is the key, and the visual cortex is the lock. When blind Amy "sight-reads" for the violin, she has to stop playing and feel the Braille notes with her left hand. Years of keeping the instrument in place while she does this has made her neck muscles so strong that she can crack a walnut between her chin and shoulder. The visual cortex is not involved, of course; she "hears" the mute notes of a phrase with her fingertips, temporarily memorizing them, and then plays them over and over until she can add that phrase to the rest of the piece.

Like most blind musicians, Amy had a very good "ear"; it actually took her less time to memorize music by listening to it repeatedly, rather than reading, even with fairly complex pieces.

None So Blind

She used Braille nevertheless for serious work, so she could isolate the composer's intent from the performer's or conductor's phrasing decisions. She didn't really miss being able to sight-read in a conventional way. She wasn't even sure what it would be like, since she had never seen sheet music before she lost her sight, and in fact had only a vague idea of what a printed page of writing looked like. So when her father came to her in her 33rd year and offered to buy her the chance of a limited gift of sight, she didn't immediately jump at it.

It was expensive and risky and grossly deforming: What if it made her only half blind, but also blunted her musical ability? She knew how other people read music, at least in theory, but after a quarter-century of doing without the skill, she wasn't sure that it would do much for her.


  • Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia.
  • Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master?
  • Related Media.

It might make her tighten up. Besides, most of her concerts were done as charities to benefit organizations for the blind or for special education. Her father argued that she would be even more effective in those venues as a recovered blind person. Cletus said he was cautiously for it.

He said he had reviewed the literature and talked to the Swiss team who had successfully done the implants on dogs and primates. He said he didn't think she would be harmed by it even if the experiment failed. What he didn't say to Amy or Lindy or anybody was the grisly Frankensteinian truth: They were just an excuse for surgically removing her eyeballs. Now a normal person would have extreme feelings about popping out somebody's eyeballs for the sake of science, and even more extreme feelings on learning that it was a husband wanting to do it to his wife.

Navigation menu

Of course Cletus was far from being normal in any respect. To his way of thinking, those eyeballs were useless vestigial appendages that blocked surgical access to the optic nerves, which would be his conduits through the brain to the visual cortex. Physical conduits, through which incredibly tiny surgical instruments would be threaded.

But we have promised not to investigate that part of the story in detail. The end result was not grisly at all. Amy finally agreed to go to Geneva, and Cletus and his surgical team all as skilled as they were unethical put her through three hour days of painstaking but painless microsurgery, and when they took the bandages off and adjusted a thousand-dollar wig for they'd had to go in behind as well as through the eyesockets , she actually looked more attractive than when they had started. That was partly because her actual hair had always been a disaster.

And now she had glass baby-blues instead of the rather scary opalescence of her natural eyes. No Buck Rogers TV cameras peering out at the world. He told her father that that part of the experiment hadn't worked, and the six Swiss scientists who had been hired for the purpose agreed. The sole intent of the operations was to subvert the normal functions of the visual cortex in such a way as to give me access to the unused parts of my brain.

Amy had known this as soon as the fog of drugs from the last operation had lifted. Her mind started making connections, and those connections made connections, and so on at a geometrical rate of growth. By the time they had finished putting her wig on, she had reconstructed the entire microsurgical procedure from her limited readings and conversations with Cletus. She had suggestions as to improving it, and was eager to go under and submit herself to further refinement. As to her feelings about Cletus, in less time than it takes to read about it, she had gone from horror to hate to understanding to renewed love, and finally to an emotional condition beyond the ability of any merely natural language to express.

Fortunately, the lovers did have Boolean algebra and propositional calculus at their disposal.

The Rifleman S4 E25 None so blind

Cletus was one of the few people in the world she could love, or even talk to one-on-one, without condescending. His IQ was so high that its number would be meaningless. Compared to her, though, he was slow, and barely literate. It was not a situation he would tolerate for long. The rest is history, as they say, and anthropology, as those of us left who read with our eyes must recognize every minute of every day.

There's none so blind as those who will not see.

Cletus was the second person to have the operation done, and he had to accomplish it while on the run from medical ethics people and their policemen. There were four the next year, though, and twenty the year after that, and then and 20, Within a decade, people with purely intellectual occupations had no choice, or one choice: By then the "secondsight" operation was totally automated, totally safe. It's still illegal in most countries, including the United States, but who is kidding whom? If your department chairman is secondsighted and you are not, do you think you'll get tenure? You can't even hold a conversation with a creature whose synapses fire six times as fast as yours, with whole encyclopedias of information instantly available.

You are, like me, an intellectual throwback. Back in Matthew 1: They are submitting to His authority as a king who is so powerful, He has the authority of God to heal them. Every Jew knew that the Messiah was coming sometime and they knew that the Messiah was to be the "Son or descendent of David". So these two blind men obviously knew about the coming Messiah but Matthew presumes that we do too and for most people today that is not true. Open my eyes Lord, to who You are as the Messiah.


  1. The Heart of the Matter (Welcome To Redemption Book 6)!
  2. There Are None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See!
  3. Staying Power (Darshian Tales #3).
  4. phrases, sayings, idioms and expressions at?
  5. Participation in Sport: International Policy Perspectives.
  6. Pivot Table Data Crunching: Microsoft Excel 2010 (MrExcel Library).

    7. In 2 Samuel 7: He is the One who will build a house-a temple-for My name. And I will secure His royal throne forever. There is a brilliant passage in Isaiah 9: It gives a prophecy years before Jesus is born. It says "For a child is born to us, a Son is given to us. The government will rest on His shoulders. And He will be called: His government and its peace will never end. He will rule with fairness and justice from the throne of His ancestor David for all eternity.

    The passionate commitment of the Lord of Heaven's Armies will make this happen! Whose son is He? Back to Church Sunday Discovering Truth When it Hurts. Teach Your People to Get Connected. This woman went blind due to an illness in her infancy. She married a fellow blind teacher, but kept her maiden name. She began her best known career in , and became one of the best known in her field, even today, often using pseudonyms to get most of her work published.

    Are blind snakes blind? We ask our submitters to thoroughly research questions and provide sources where possible. Feel free to post corrections or additions. This is server B