APR’ 20

23

 I came across a passage in one of the books that I am reading and it struck me so much that I felt I had to share it.

I was bored at the lycée, bored almost all the time, and that was certainly not because of my companions or my teachers, but in spite of them. The boredom I am talking about was not the impatience of a child who wants to play instead of working (even though, naturally, I liked to play) nor the windiness of a mind which listens for five minutes, goes woolgathering, and then listens again. This process upsets conscientious children to the point of nausea, and throws those who are less tense into total mental sleep. I rarely fell asleep in class, at least no more often than my neighbors. I had a strong intellectual curiosity. Mathematics I did find dull, but Latin, Greek and German interested me, and literature, history, geography and the natural sciences made me feel as if I were visiting magic gardens. Lessons and homework, instead of tiring me, delighted me. I drank from the springs of knowledge as from a fountain. But all the same I was bored at school.

As soon as the classroom door closed, the smell of the room went to my head. It was not that my classmates were dirty, but each of them had a body, and forty bodies shut up in a small space were too many. It was like standing at the edge of a stagnant marsh. But why should it be so?

I have already said that for blind people there is such a thing as moral odor, and I think that was the case at school. A group of human beings who stay in one room by compulsion— or because of social obligation which comes to the same thing— begins to smell. That is literally the case, and with children it happens even faster. Just think how much suppressed anger, humiliated independence, frustrated vagrancy and impotent curiosity can be accumulated by forty boys between the ages of ten and fourteen!

So that was the source of the unpleasant odor and the smoke, which, for me, was like a physical presence in class. What I saw there was confusion, colors were faded and even dirty. The blackboard was black, the floor was black, the tables were black and so were the books. Even the teacher, in terms of light, was no more than gray. To be otherwise he had to be remarkable, not only for what he knew (learning in those days gave me little light) but remarkable as a person as well.

Boredom bound and gagged all my senses. Even sounds in class lost their volume and their depth and went lifeless. Every bit of my passion for living was needed to stand the test. At bottom I must have lacked discipline, not making up my mind to rebel, but still an incorrigible individualist. That was certainly part of my makeup, but then too there was blindness and its special world, to which school was doing violence. I had to wait years, at least until adolescence, to quiet the scandal which started inside my head at school. I doubt whether I have made peace with it even now.

I couldn’t understand why the teachers never talked about the life going on inside them or inside us. They talked in great detail about the origin of mountains, the assassination of Julius Caesar, the properties of triangles, the way beetles reproduce and how often, and the combustion of carbon dioxide. Sometimes they even talked about men, but only as personages. There were the personages of ancient history, those of the Renaissance and of Molière’s comedies, or a personage stranger than all the others, the one they called “individual” or “citizen,” of whom I never had the slightest conception. There was never any talk of real people like the teacher or ourselves.

As for the subject of all subjects, the fact that the world is not just outside us but also within, this was entirely lacking. I understood that the teacher could not or did not wish to talk about what was going on inside him. That was his affair, and after all I was not anxious myself to talk about what went on in me. But the inner life was so much more than a personal thing. There were a thousand desires and goals my companions shared with me, and I knew it. To accumulate knowledge was good and beautiful, but the reason for men to acquire it would have been more meaningful, and no one spoke of that.

I could not help thinking that in the whole business someone was cheating somewhere. I felt I had to defend myself, and I did so by mobilizing all the images of my inner world, all the ones bound up with living creatures or living things. Sitting on my dark chair in front of my sickening table, under the gray downpour of learning, I set myself to weaving a kind of cocoon. Still, while I was a good boy I was sly, and managed it so that no one would guess I was hostile. This interior world of mine was so important to me that I was determined to protect it from shipwreck, and to rescue it I never stopped making concessions to the public, to books, to my parents and teachers. I owe my brilliance as a student to this rescue operation.

In order to be left in peace, I undertook to learn everything they wanted me to, Latin, entomology, geometry and the history of the Chaldeans. I learned to type on an ordinary typewriter so I could hand my homework directly to the teachers like the others. Every day I carried my Braille typewriter to school, and put it on a felt cushion to deaden the sound, and then I took my notes. I listened, responded, listened, but was never in it heart and soul. As a boy I was cut in two. I was there and elsewhere, always going and coming between the important and the meaningless.

Now that the experience is behind me— the boredom thick as oil, the moral curvature which lasted for years—I can see that I owe them something, as the sign that some vital spirit in me refused to turn its back on childhood, and would never admit that truth was ready-made. There was no going back on it. I would never relinquish the sense of wonder I felt when I went blind. Even if there were not a book in the world to record it, I should still feel it.

I was not expecting to find this in an autobiography about a blind, WWII Resistance fighter. But here it is. Every time I read these lines, I am thrown back upon my own memories of schooling. It’s as if I am turning a shiny object over in my hand under a bright light and watching how the refraction of light changes, appears and disappears. Lusseyran’s words resonate with me as so profoundly true that it is also painful.

If you are curious to read more, the title of his autobiography is And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II.