I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty-two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a disaster can do strange things to people. It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn’t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don’t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.
Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I felt helpless and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me--a potential to live, you might call it--which I didn’t see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic, If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front perch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.
It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was making fun of me and I was hurt. "I can’t use this," I said. "Take it with you," he urged me, "and roll it around." The words stuck in my head. "Roll it around!" By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.
The disaster that happened when the writer was 4 years old ______.
A. makes him believe in life more deeply than the other people.
B. makes him appreciate the value of the rest of his faculties.
C. makes him prefer going without his eyes.
D. strengthens his memory of the color of red.
All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on average I made progress.
