I have a tendency, as many partners do, to assume that Lily has such intimate daily access to what I’m thinking and feeling that what I’m going through should be obvious to her. But our closest intimates still aren’t mind readers.

Robert Hine, another fastidiously observant college professor who went blind in middle age, wrote that “to the blind, no loss can be as great as the dimming of loved faces. There is no substitute for the interchange of a smile.”

When I listen to a book, I can get absorbed in it, but in the end I don’t feel like I have quite as strong a handle on the text—the language, the structure—as I do when I read visually.

Some biomechanical researchers have found that walking is a form of constant, unconsciously corrected falling.

“In some ways, life would be easier for me if I were sighted,” she continued. “And I can hold that idea simultaneously in my mind with: I have equal value and dignity as a person who is sighted.”