But as I listened to the narrator talk about the raised flat section that was the woman’s hair, I couldn’t find the area being described. I scanned my fingers over the whole drawing, trying to piece together where one woman ended and another began, trying to understand their shapes and positions.

I failed utterly.

I sat in my self-imposed darkness, both hands lightly grazing the drawing, eyebrows drawn in frustration. My fingers weren’t sensitive enough, and my brain wasn’t putting together the jumbled pieces of the image. Finally I rewound the tape and opened my eyes, exhausted, disappointed, and disturbed.

• • •

My visit to the library was merely an introduction to my internship; I spent the rest of the summer interviewing people who were blind and writing about their experiences. But as much as I learned from those people, nothing jarred me quite as much as my library visit did. I’m a Harvard student, I don’t like to admit that I cannot understand something. It was during those three hours that I began to understand that blindness is not trying to reconstruct the visual world, but of learning non-visual ways to experience the world. One man told me in an interview that his definition of “pretty” was largely based upon an appealing texture, something very smooth. I thought of the zit on my forehead and realized how ugly I would be to him, and justly so on his criteria.