Sight is the faculty or power of seeing. We humans depend on seeing to save ourselves from falling over obstacles or crossing a road in front of a moving vehicle. This faculty helps in our daily lives, and is also a source of great joy to us. We welcome the sight of members of our families, of friends, and of all our fellow creatures, including animals, birds and fish. We perceive natural beauty in plants and rainbows through sight., which also enables us to appreciate and study visual arts such as painting, and other arts which avail themselves to us partially through sight – theatrical performances and ballet, for example.
Blindness is a tragic affliction, however brave the sufferers are. They are unable to make their way around an unfamiliar building if the only guide is written signs with no available translations into braille. Many courageous blind people seek and achieve independence with the help of a white stick, which indicates to sighted passers-by that guidance may be needed, or with the support of a guide dog which will soon become a beloved companion.
Only the blind can tell us if it is better to be born blind, or to become so after some years of being able to see. Those born blind will only partly understand what they are missing, whereas those who become blind know only too well. Their memories of seeing may torment them or perhaps be some consolation.
We may wonder if love at first sight is possible. It happens in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but the protagonists have too little time to understand each other, and some of us believe that love must encompass understanding. We all have faults, and those who love us forgive us for them.
Blind people by definition lack sight, but do not necessarily lack insight. Insight is not a sense of the same genre as sight, but a gift of the mind, enabling its owner to gain an accurate and deep understanding of something. To acquire insight we need patience and intelligence.
Examples of insight in literature abound. No one has outdone the ancient Greek tragedians who wrote of the blind prophet Tiresias whose messages people ignored at their peril. Sophocles, one of the most noted playwrights of the ancient world, wrote the tragedy Oedipus Rex in 429 BC (CE, Common Era in non-Christian terminology). The myth on which the play is based is that an oracle tells Laius, King of Thebes, that his son will kill him. When Jocasta, Laius’s wife, wife, gives birth to a son, Laius orders her to kill the child. She cannot bear to do so. Instead she abandons him in the hope that someone will adopt him, and a compassionate couple in Corinth, Merope and Polybus, do. One day Oedipus consults the Delphic Oracle, which tells him that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus thinks Merope and Polybus are his parents. To save them, he leaves Corinth and travels to Thebes. On his way there he encounters an old man. They fight about whose chariot has the right of way and in the conflict Oedipus kills the old man, who turns out to be Laius, his father.
Still ignorant about who his father was, Oedipus enters Thebes, becomes its king, marries Jocasta, and they have four children. A plague descends on Thebes and the people beg Oedipus for help. He sends for Tiresias, who angers him at first by refusing to tell what he knows. At this stage Oedipus still has physical sight, and his blindness comprises lack of understanding and of insight. He remains metaphorically blind to his past and the prophecy he has fulfilled. Tiresias further prophecies that Oedipus will leave Thebes blind, widowed and in rags. Jocasta kills herself when she learns the truth. Oedipus seizes from her clothes a brooch, and with its pins stabs himself in both eyes, so that he is blinded, and leaves Thebes a wanderer, his power gone. One of his daughters, Antigone, comes with him. Oedipus has gained insight but at a terrible cost. To learn and accept the truth can mean mental torture.
Shakespeare endows some of his characters with insight. An example is the Fool in King Lear. At first some of what he says sounds like nonsense, but underlying it is the sharp wits that constitute insight. After Lear gives away his country to Goneril and Regan, his two elder daughters, the Fool says,
“… thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gav’st them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches (sings) Then they for sudden joy did weep, … “
Throughout the play the Fool never abandons Lear, and never spares him the truth. When Lear convinces himself that Regan will be kind to him, he and the Fool converse:
FOOL … I can tell thee why a snail has a house.
LEAR Why?
FOOL Why, to put’s head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case.
The Fool’s role as a court jester is to entertain King Lear with his humour and wit. He proves himself to be one of the wisest, most loyal, and most honest characters throughout the play. He also functions as Lear’s conscience because he is the only character in the play from whom Lear accepts criticism.
A recent example of insight was a headteacher speaking in an interview about parents taking their children on holiday during term time. The headteacher said that fines were ineffectual. A better way was to persuade parents that their children must attend school to gain an education and acquire self-discipline. He also thought of a practical measure: change the dates of some of the school holidays so that parents could take advantage of lower prices outside the most popular and most expensive times for holidays, such as August.
As long as we have been able to think and reason we have benefited from those among us gifted with insight. To recognise them and emulate their actions and decisions is a way to acquire insight ourselves.
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