Touching the Rock

I can't remember ever reading anything quite as compelling. I'm not going blind nor do I have any cognitive disabilities. However, if you are a practicing meditator as I am and are interested in the nature of consciousness itself, you will be quite intrigued with this highly descriptive account of both the visual and non-visual aspects of perception. If this book doesn't inspire you to start thinking outside the box, nothing will. That been said, the average reader will find this to be an unforgettable, beautifully written book well worth reading. Highly recommended.

In place of the word "unsentimental" often used to describe this book I'd use "Lynchian", as in David. Blindness is just the starting-off point: The book is really a luxuriant journey into the *other* four senses and the heightened reality one begins to feel -- for instance how the white noise of a sudden rain can throw your outdoor echolocation into turmoil and immobilize you at some random place. With all respect to anyone looking for a good book on the disability, this one is for the artists.

On the front cover Oliver Sacks is quoted: "Staggering. . . the most extraordinary, precise, deep, and beautiful account of blindness I have ever read." But this book is primarily a message of facing change and developing methods for coping. Of compensating, of reaching out, of accepting your plight and going forward. You sense the author's despair and frustration, but he manages to see his difficulties as challenges. He engages you in the struggles he faces and overcomes. After all, he has a wife and four children, he lectures and attends conferences. Perhaps the most fascinating chapter of all, for me, was how he faced giving a lecture when he could no longer read notes. He eventually learned how to write his speech in his mind so that he could simply read one page as the next ones were being formulated. I pictured it as something like the beginning of a Star Wars movie. John Hull has somelthing to teach us all.

Heard the taped version of TOUCHING THE ROCK by John Hull, a moving memoir of a university lecturer who slowly lost his vision over a period of several years . . . he recordedhis thoughts in a diary, and I must admit to being touchedabout how both he and his family dealt with his condition . . . even typing this brings teary thoughts tomind . . . imagine having seen a child as a youngster,then not being able to see her again as she grows up . . . ornever having seen another child from the time he wasborn . . . it makes me want to hug my daughter, Risa . . . andto appreciate all that I do have!

This book was given to me as a gift a few years ago, and while I am neither going blind nor am actually blind, I found many of the ideas and experiences and thoughts and feelings expressed in this book to be very similar to my own. I have some particular cognitive difficulties (prosopagnosia, often called "face blindness") which give me a rather different outlook on life from most people, and I was amazed to see just how much in common my outlook on life was when compared with the author's life experiences. Well, maybe I wasn't that surprized, but it was still an eye-opening (no pun intended) experience for me to read this book in that context. Needless to say, I enjoyed this book very very much. It reads more like a personal journal or diary than an actual book, and that gives the whole book a very personal experience when reading it.