Through St. Dunstan's to Light

On a battlefield in 1916, James H. Rawlinson's world went dark. A Canadian soldier in the Great War, he sustained a head wound that erased his sight forever. What follows is neither a tale of tragedy nor a simple redemption narrative, but something more honest and harder won: the measured, sometimes agonizing, sometimes unexpectedly funny account of a young man learning to inhabit a world he can no longer see. Rawlinson chronicles his early despair with disarming candor, the particular cruelty of darkness that descends without warning, and his eventual arrival at St. Dunstan's, the revolutionary hostel for blinded soldiers founded by Sir Arthur Pearson. There, amid fellow veterans learning Braille and typewriting, finding their way through unfamiliar rooms, and relearning the simplest acts of daily life, Rawlinson discovers that blindness is not an ending but a different kind of beginning. His instructors become friends, his teachers become guides in the most literal sense, and Pearson himself emerges as a man who understood that the real injury of war is not the wound but what society does with the wounded afterward. This memoir, written in the early twentieth century with no precedent to follow, becomes itself a kind of map for everyone who would come after.