cover image Touching the Rock

Touching the Rock

John M. Hull. Pantheon Books, $19 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-679-40168-1

Between 1983 and 1986, the author, a professor of religious education in the British midlands, recorded his experiences as a newly blind person: his remarriage, his final eye operation, the births of his three children, his thoughts about his work and personal relationships. We learn of Hull's need to carve out ``a world into which the sighted cannot penetrate, a place where some kind of inner control can be established.'' As we follow the author through public events and social engagements, feel his embarrassments and depressions, experience his struggle adapting to blindness, we discern much about the quest for a unified life. Hull's unsentimental memoir has no resolution, ``no particular ending, because blindness has no ending.'' (Mar . )