Jacques Lusseyran

The second truth is that light does not come to us from without.

There were no longer the same differences between things lighted brightly, less brightly, or not at all.

Every sound, every scent and every shape was forever changing into light.

And light itself changing into colour to make a kaleidoscope of my blindness.

A light so continuous and so intense was so far beyond my comprehension that sometimes I doubted it.

Colours, all the colours of the rainbow, also survived.

For me, the child who loved to draw and paint, colours made a celebration so unexpected that I spent hours playing with them.

And all the more easily, now they were more docile than they used to be.

My father and mother, the people I met or ran into in the street, all had their characteristic colour, which I had never seen before I went blind.

Yet now this special attribute impressed itself on me as part of them, as definitely as any impression created by a face.

Still the colours were only a game, while light was my whole reason for living.

I let it rise in me like water in a well and I rejoiced.

I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly because as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes.

and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside.

All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless inside it.

But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them,

I was rewarded with light.

Before I was ten years old, I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else, ready to take its place if it should fall by the way.

And this continuing miracle of healing, I heard expressed in the Lord's Prayer, I repeated at night before going to sleep.

and how should I not have it in the presence of the marvel which kept renewing itself?