“Because those of us who see gain 87% of our perceptions through sight, blindness is one of the most feared of physical handicaps.”Annual Report of the President of the American Foundation for the Blind, Inc., 1948.
2.
The adventitiously blind retain, to some degree, visual memory of spatial images and experiences if blinded after the age of three years, thus facilitating their comprehension of space. These images tend to fade and to be forgotten with time.
3.
“L'architecture est le jeu savant, correct et magnifique des volumes assembles sous la lumière.” See Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [Le Corbusier], Vers une Architecture, (Paris: Crès, 1923).
4.
“A newly blind girl on a visit to The Lighthouse directly from leaving the hospital provides an illustration:
5.
'… Here was the safe, segregated world of the sightless—a completely different world, I was assured by the social worker, from the one I had just left….
6.
I was to spend the rest of my life making mops with other blind people, eating with other blind people, dancing with other blind people. I became nauseated with fear, as the picture grew in my mind. Never had I come upon such destructive segregation.'”
7.
KeitlenT. (with N. Lobsenz), Farewell to Fear (New York: Avon, 1962), pp. 37–38; as cited by Ervin Goffman, Stigma (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), p. 37.
