The Point of Vanishing : : a Memoir of two Years in Solitude
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Prologue -- Part I. Into the Blind Spot -- Part II. Learning to See -- Part III. The Point of Vanishing.
"On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod left his dorm-room to play a pick-up game of basketball. In the skirmish for a loose ball, a boy's finger hooked behind Axelrod's eyeball and severed his optic nerve. Permanently blinded in his right eye, Axelrod returned a week later to the same dorm-room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the smooth veneer of reality had been broken, and where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf. Five years later, heartbroken from a love affair in Italy and still desperate for a sense of orientation he could trust, Axelrod retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods. Miles from the nearest neighbor, at the dead-end of an unmaintained dirt road, he lived without a computer, without a television, and largely without human contact for two years. Whether tending to the woodstove, or snow-shoeing through the trees, he devoted his energies to learning to see again--to paying attention. He needed to find, with society's pressures and rush now removed, what really mattered. He needed to dig down to a sense of meaning that couldn't be changed in an instant. What followed was a strange and beautiful series of sensory adventures, shadowed by a haunting descent into the dangers of solitude. A gorgeous search into the profoundly human questions of perception, time, and identity, The Point of Vanishing announces the arrival of a major new literary voice of the timeless--which is to say, a major new voice for our harried times"-- Provided by publisher.
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PUBLISHED
Boston : Beacon Press, 2015.
Year Published: 2015
Description: 211 pages ; 22 cm.
Language: English
Format: Book
ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
9780807075463
0807075469
SUBJECTS
Axelrod, Howard, -- 1973-
Axelrod, Howard, -- 1973- -- Homes and haunts -- Vermont.
Young men -- Biography.
People with visual disabilities -- Biography.
Eye -- Patients -- Biography.
Vision, Monocular -- Psychological aspects.
Solitude -- Psychological aspects.
Visual perception.
Self-perception.
Vermont -- Biography.
Autobiographies.