Touching the Rock, John Hull’s account of his “experience of blindness,” is not such a tale: it has no clear beginning, middle, or end it lacks literary pretension it eschews the narrative form itself – and it is, to my mind, a masterpiece. ![]() There have been many autobiographies written by the blind – narratives at once poignant and inspiring – that bring out the emotional and moral effects of blindness in a life, and the qualities of will and humor and fortitude needed to transcend them. Oliver Sacks called Touching the Rock “a masterpiece”: In a review in The New York Review of Books, entitled The Dark, Paradoxical Gift, the late neurologist and prolific author Dr. The book opens in the summer of 1983 as Professor Hull begins “sinking into darkness” and concludes in the summer of 1986 when he “touches the rock” of total, absolute, “deep” blindness. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and opened in theaters throughout the United Kingdom on July 1, 2016. Now, 26 years after the publication of Touching the Rock, filmmakers Peter Middleton and James Spinney have brought Professor Hull’s story to a worldwide audience, via the award-winning feature film Notes on Blindness. ![]() Professor Hull (1935-2015) was the Honorary Professor of Practical Theology in the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham, England and Emeritus Professor of Religious Education at the University of Birmingham. Hull’s audio diary and exploration of the many processes (physical, emotional, psychological, and metaphysical) that accompanied his steady, intractable journey through vision loss and into total blindness, where he began to “…take up residence in another world” in which human experience was transformed. Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, first published in 1990, is the late British theologian John M. ![]() It has to be decomposed, experimentally or in neurological disorders, to show the elements that compose it.” ~Oliver Sacks, M.D., In the River of Consciousness Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness “Vision, in ordinary circumstances, is seamless and gives no indication of the underlying processes on which it depends.
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