| Description |
211 pages ; 22 cm |
| Summary |
"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. |
| Contents |
Prologue -- Part I. Into the Blind Spot -- Part II. Learning to See -- Part III. The Point of Vanishing. |
| Subject |
Axelrod, Howard, 1973-
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Young men -- United States -- Biography.
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People with visual disabilities -- United States -- Biography.
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Eye -- Wounds and injuries -- Patients -- United States -- Biography.
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Vision, Monocular -- Psychological aspects.
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Axelrod, Howard, 1973- -- Homes and haunts -- Vermont.
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Solitude -- Psychological aspects.
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Visual perception.
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Self-perception.
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Vermont -- Biography.
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| Genre/Form |
Autobiographies.
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| ISBN |
9780807075463 (paperback : acid-free paper) |
|
0807075469 (paperback : acid-free paper) |
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