Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
Alice Conway is assistant general counsel, commercial and employment law, for Monsanto. She received her law degree from Washington University—and a Ph.D. in comparative literature the same year. She studied English, French, German, Spanish, and Latin literature in the original.
In Braille.
Curious how a mind as fine as Conway’s perceives and processes our overwhelmingly visual world, I pepper her with idiotic questions. When I reach, “How has the absence of vision shaped the way you think?” she arches an eyebrow; how on earth would she know? I press on, asking if maybe I could go with her to the Missouri Botanical Garden or the Zoo and listen to her impressions as we walk. I’m wanting a parlor game, I realize about 10 seconds too late; I want her to wow the rest of us with all the amazing deductions she makes with her remaining, sharpened senses.
She demurs. “That would be a ‘blind world’ story,” she says gently, “and I’m not interested in doing that.”
We’re to meet at a Saint Louis Bread Company on Olive Boulevard, near Monsanto. Strangers come in, eye each other, glance over at the tables, squint up at the board to determine their smoothie choices or the soup of the day. A teenager neatly avoids sideswiping an elderly lady with his tray. A young woman flirts with a guy at the counter, lifting her gaze to meet his eyes.
Conway arrives late and apologetic; her ride dropped her off at the wrong Bread Co. Tall and willowy, with skin so fair it’s almost translucent, she’s wearing a chic cherry-red suit. She looks tired, though; she’s been traveling almost nonstop for the past four months, training managers across the Midwest in the nuances of employment law.
She pulls out a Braille Lite word processor to show me. I’m struck by the paradox. It’s like the Pat Parker poem:
The first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black.
Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.
For Conway, though, technology isn’t “blind world.” It’s bridge, like the Focus 40 she now uses at Monsanto, a Braille keyboard and display that connects to a regular computer.
“People think Braille’s slower, and it’s really not,” she says. “Some people ask, ‘Why can’t they just make the raised letters the same as print?’ But Louis Braille realized you have to run your finger straight across something, so the letters have to be simple and blocky”—no swashes or ascenders. A six-dot rectangle is punched, with various dot combinations raised, to represent all the letters. “That way, they felt there would be some logic to it,” Conway explains.
Carmelita Williamson met Edgar Conway the first week of college, in upstate New York. She’d graduated from high school at 15; he’d graduated at 16. Sensing a mind as alive and eager as his own, he mustered the courage to invite her to a tea dance.
“I’d love to go,” she told him, eyes shining, “but I don’t have anything to wear.”
“I think what you’re wearing is charming,” he told her, his voice going a little husky.
They fell in love so hard, they barely noticed their professors. When Carmelita came home for the holidays, grades in hand, her mother sighed. “Maybe we sent you to college too early.”
Carmelita rose to the bait. “Look, you know those subjects I got D’s in? I’m going to get A’s by the end of the year.”
“Well, honey girl, a B would be fine,” her mother assured her. But she got A’s, and she and Edgar married as soon as she graduated. They kept it a secret. Her parents thought she was too young and no one was good enough; his uncle was paying his tuition to law school. By the third year, Edgar was sick of sneaking around to see his own wife. “Just be patient,” she
urged him.
They announced their marriage as soon as he graduated. They were living in Long Island, N.Y., when Alice was born—prematurely. Four happy months passed before Carmelita noticed that the baby wasn’t following her with her eyes anymore. She took Alice to the eye doctor immediately.
When they came home, Carmelita went straight to bed. The future she already instinctively shared with her daughter had gone flat and dark. The doctor had told her that Alice must have gotten too much oxygen in the incubator, because scar tissue had formed on her retinas. She was blind.
Carmelita sobbed for her child. Then she sat up and thought, “Wait a minute. This kid is great. And I’m going to find out what it is that will make her life full and rich.”
That, at least, is how it was told to Alice. “She wasn’t glib about it,” Alice says. “She realized she was in for a rough ride. There are a lot of things to talk over with a blind kid.”
There are a lot of things to do, too. Before Alice even started walking, Carmelita had learned Braille. Soon Alice’s starfish fingers were tracing out the dots. She learned nature’s Braille, too: She’d sit under the table with their dog, Jet, and explore her ears and paws. Jet, who was both black and fast, sat very still until Alice finished, then licked her small hand. That sudden, sandpapery-wet swipe of affection made the world feel right.
But she was still lonely.
At age 4, she announced, “I want to go where other blind people are!” Her mother took her to visit the Missouri School for the Blind. In Carmelita’s mind, walking through those doors—especially back then—meant entering a narrower, more circumscribed world. She wanted her daughter’s world to be wide open. But she didn’t speak a word of this.
Alice walked around the dorm, met the staff, met other kids. But what she kept thinking was, “I have my friends, I have my parents, I have my toys, I have my dog. I’d rather be at home.”
She went to kindergarten at Washington University. Carmelita went along and watched what the teacher did with the “reading-ready” kids, then took Alice home and did the same things with her. Edgar regularly traveled to Kentucky for work, so he’d stop by the American Printing House for the Blind and bring home Braille books. “They really smelled good,” Alice remembers. “One of my friends teased me: ‘Why do you sniff your books?’ But it was the paper—it had this wonderful, fresh, bracing, clean smell.”
Other childhood memories turn her cheeks pink with remembered pleasure: “Sledding. Big brown cows for dessert, with root beer and ice cream. Swimming in the lake.” The Conways spent every summer in upstate New York, at the foot of the Adirondack Mountains, with family in Alice’s grandmother’s big, white, two-story clapboard farmhouse. There Alice, an only child, was instantly transformed into one of the gang, running and shouting with eight cousins. Evenings, she’d play checkers (round and square) with her grandfather. “When he started humming, that’s when I knew I was tactically eliminated,” she says.
Carmen Miller, one of the cousins, says nobody ever did anything differently because Alice was blind; they’d make small adjustments so she could join them, then forget again. When they went hiking, if Alice twisted her ankle, they’d just say sorry. “We never did cut her any slack,” Miller says. Alice pulled her share of pranks, although not always deftly: “She might play a game and pull a chair out from under you, but you’d hear it, or she’d start laughing and give herself away.
“She still has the same sweet smile when she’s happy.”
There are a lot of things to talk over with a blind kid. Like, “You’ve got to smile.”
“I could be very happy and look absolutely poker-faced,” Alice explains. “My mother would say, ‘I’m not trying to tell you how to feel, but if you are happy, you want to communicate it. People like to look at a happy face more than an unhappy one.”
Carmelita nagged until Alice’s little face began to take its cues from her mood. Then Carmelita moved to Alice’s eye-pressing.
“I don’t know why blind kids like to press their eyes,” Alice says. “I never knew why I did it. She’d say, ‘You are going to push them back in your head, and they’ll interfere with your brains!’”
(Reading about blindness, I come across a mention of German physiologist Johannes Peter Müller. In the mid-1800s, he found that if he put pressure on the eye, it led to a sensation of light, a sensation of vision. Intrigued, Alice says this could, indeed, explain it.)
Another thing to talk over was getting left out, when the other kids were running and chasing each other on the playground.
“They’re just burning off energy,” Carmelita said.
“Well, yeah, what if I want to burn off some energy?”
In fourth grade, her triumph came with kickball baseball: Alice got to “run with someone, throw the ball and try to outrun it, try not to throw it at a baseman.” She got a couple of home runs and talked about nothing else for weeks.
Around the same time, she got her first clue to her future profession: “I had been enjoying what I thought was a wonderful conversation with my father for three hours. He finally broke away and said to Mom, ‘I think she’s going to be a lawyer, because she sure can argue!’”
He teased that her favorite word was “wumzif”—a.k.a. “What happens if…?” To give him a little peace from her pestering, Carmelita bought him some art supplies. “Chippy the Chipmunk was his signature for whatever he drew,” Alice recalls.
She couldn’t see his drawings, but she could imagine Chippy—his fur, his cheerful chattering, his warm breath and tickly whiskers, his shape. Whenever her mother thought a sketch or diagram would help explain a concept in one of Alice’s textbooks, the cousins sat at the kitchen table, focused into silence as they piped Elmer’s glue along the outlines.
Carmelita transcribed books into Braille at lightning speed, and Alice read just as fast, easily outstripping many of her sighted classmates as they pored over their conventional books. When Alice moved on to Ladue Horton Watkins High School, Carmelita started using a network of volunteers and the Library of Congress to transcribe even fat science textbooks into Braille.
“She’d get the materials in advance and farm them out,” Alice explains. “She was hard-driving enough to do this at a time when we did not know anyone else who was doing it that way. I have not heard of it before or since. And yet she was mellow enough that she could handle a kid being a kid.”
When Alice was 12, her father died. In time, Carmelita dated a bit: “She was popular and beautiful and had a little Barbie-doll figure,” Alice says proudly.
I ask whether she liked any of the men her mother dated.
“Absolutely. I was all for all of them! Once, she dated a lawyer, and I would ask him those questions everybody asks, like ‘How can you defend a guilty person?’ He believed in the system: Everyone has to be represented, and that’s the only way you get close to the truth on this earth.”
Alice’s enthusiasm didn’t convince Carmelita to remarry, though. “I think she was so committed to raising me, she didn’t want to negotiate on any of that,” Alice says.
Still, she says she learned a lot by observing her mother date—and even more when her mother drew her close and said, “If it doesn’t happen that you have a lot of dates, if you end up being single—it might happen, because guys don’t have that nurturing instinct; that’s why more blind guys are married than women—you’ve got to figure that God has a purpose for you on this earth.”
“As I went through high school and college, I could see that she was onto something there,” Alice adds. “I had a couple of friends who were heartbroken.”
Alice went to Wash. U. on a Mylonas Scholarship, given to promising scholars in the humanities. Freshman year was rough: Her friends had all gone on to other universities, and the atmosphere at Wash. U. was thinner and cooler, chilly with rules and expectations. As her mother had warned, she didn’t get asked out on dates.
Later, when I ask if she’s ever been in love, she says, “Oh, I don’t think there’s a woman alive who hasn’t. I’m hard-wired to think men are great.” So has she ever had her heart broken?
She tries, rather adroitly, to skirt the question, then falls silent. “I’ll tell you about a heartbreak I can talk about,” she says finally, leaving me even more curious. “My first semester in college was so rough, because I missed everybody in my high school, and I missed the rough-and-tumble debating, and, oh, I missed the chorale. That was a real experience of heartbreak.”
We leave it at that.
She’d much rather talk about intellectual challenges, like the bar exam. The summer Alice studied for it, Carmelita kept both the air conditioning and the fan going in the farmhouse kitchen, and she sat at that kitchen table and translated all the bar materials into Braille. Alice sailed through the exam.
She’d already received her juris doctor and doctor of philosophy degrees—at the same graduation ceremony. She’d also developed and taught two courses. One, on literature and opera, compared pairs—William Shakespeare’s Othello and Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, Virgil’s Aeneid and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas... The other studied rare works of literature with happy characters at their center.
“I guess I might have been trying to get to know my mother a little bit,” she says now. “My father and I didn’t have naturally happy temperaments. If we had a cold day in spring, neither one of us was fit to converse with. Mom was the one who lifted up the spirits of the entire household.”
Alice had chosen comparative literature for the same reason she’d chosen law: It was about persuasion. If a novel didn’t persuade you that it was true, then you didn’t care what happened next. She chose to compare literature in four languages because it sounded more interesting than just doing English lit. “Why not have the whole world?” she asks lightly.
Like her daughter, Carmelita was famous for her sense of humor. She waitressed in college, and one day, she came back with an order and tripped over the guy’s feet, splattering dinner all over his lap. Instead of apologizing in terror, she laughed so hard she couldn’t stand up straight.
When Alice began her law career, Carmelita began trying, subtly, to test her ethical sensibilities. When Carmelita read the newspaper aloud, she’d read an article about a lawyer and slur the word a little more each time it occurred, so by the end she was saying “liar.” At that point, Alice would protest. “Too late to object,” her mother would say—hadn’t Alice been listening?
“A couple of times a week, she would call me a hired gun,” Alice adds. “Just slip it into conversation. I didn’t like that at all, but I didn’t have a comeback.” One day, Carmelita said the phrase again, and Alice wheeled on her and exclaimed, “I am not a hired gun. I want to tell you why this client needs justice!”
Alice started out doing trust and estate law and representing tax protesters. “I just didn’t have that spark of connection with trusts and estates”—she mimes nodding off—“and I knew someone had to represent tax protesters, but did it have to be me? I pay my taxes!”
She decided she wanted to have just one client and get to know that client very, very well. That’s how she landed at Monsanto. First, she practiced antitrust law, which was in a quiet period at the time—too quiet for Alice. She moved into employment law, training corporate managers to avoid discrimination, harassment, retaliation—or as she puts it, “anything that might make a reasonable person think, ‘Boy, I wish I’d never brought that up.’” She also worked in the business conduct office, and for the past few years, half of her practice has been commercial law, helping negotiate contracts and handle disputes.
As she took on more and more responsibility, Carmelita kept her balanced. “She would say, ‘Quit while you’re behind,’” Alice remembers, grinning.
So was Alice perhaps a little driven?
“It has been said.”
The choir director at Our Lady of the Pillar Catholic Church in Creve Coeur briefs Alice, rattling off a series of hymn numbers. She’s got them in one. He takes her arm and they cross the altar, Alice pausing and genuflecting in exactly the right spot. Habits of the heart don’t need to be cued.
Her back ballerina-straight, she kneels to pray, then sits, smoothing a dark, silky cap-sleeve dress with pale-pink polka dots. When the organ music stops, she rises with alacrity, reaches down for her cane, and walks to the lectern, arms outstretched so she’ll know when she’s arrived. The choir is off for the summer, so she’s singing solo, her voice strong against the big organ’s whoosh of melody.
The congregation joins in heartily. She doesn’t raise her volume to overshadow them, but her voice somehow remains distinct. As she sings, her hands move lightly over her Braille, her long fingers’ touch as delicate as someone using a holographic keyboard, a projection of light alone.
She turns and listens intently to the priest, who says, “Let’s take a moment to remember our own weaknesses and our own faults, asking God to remove those things that keep us from growing closer to Him.” At the music, she spins back and comes in immediately to sing “Glory to God.”
There is authority in Alice’s voice, depth and resonance and precision. When she sings alone, her voice fills the church and enters your body—without ever seeming loud. After each verse, she extends her right arm, palm up, to invite the response. After the warm clarity of her voice, the congregation sounds singsong and phlegmy.
As she’s finding her way back to her seat, her head tilts up a bit, and the corners of her mouth go slightly down in concentration. She remains composed, not rushed or jerky, and as soon she’s sure of her way, the uncertainty melts, and her movements take on an extraordinary grace.
When I start my car after Mass, Jessye Norman’s voice floods the interior. Alice’s voice, I realize with a jolt of awe, has the same resonance. For years, she tells me later, she flew to New York for voice lessons at The Juilliard School. “Alice needs voice lessons?” the other choir members would say, abashed. Her voice was already something to which they could only aspire. But even after the New York trips got too cumbersome, she continued studying, now with voice specialist Alice Montgomery here in St. Louis.
“She has this silvery, shimmery voice,” Montgomery says. “But she’s a mezzo-soprano, and she was having some issues with her upper range. We worked on getting a line to her voice, so it sounds the same from the bottom to the top and has the same effortless ease.” When Alice had to make sure not to get nervous and clutch before the high notes, she came up with imagery for herself: She pretended she was cuddling Dolce, her first guinea pig, and soothing him.
“She works hard,” Montgomery says, “and she’ll do any silly thing I ask her to, like jump up and down for the breath. Last year, she had a breakthrough and hit her first open high C.” The two women hugged in jubilation, and later, Alice named her new guinea pig Montgomery.
Montgomery (the furrier one) hears a lot of Felix Mendelssohn: “He has these soaring long lines of melody, and the harmonies are extremely beautiful, but they are also logical.” Mozart comes next, and Bach. Such music is, Alice says, “a foretaste of heaven. If it’s nothing more than this, it will be worth it.”
Visual art, especially drawings, can be Brailled, but Alice isn’t a fan. “I’ve never gone to a Brailled drawing and said, ‘How beautiful!’” she says. Instead, she goes regularly to the opera, the symphony, and the theater. And she sings, both with the choir and with The Morning Etude Club of St. Louis.
“Singing with a group is transcendent,” she says. “When things are going right, you are just not that worried about yourself. Of course you are trying to do your part and blend in, but it’s not as narcissistic as
a solo.”
She seems so alive to beauty that I email later to ask how she defines it. “I’m struggling with the definition,” she emails several days later, “but not because of blindness. It’s subjective, isn’t it? I guess beauty is whatever pleases the intellect and senses by lifting them above the present moment, to delight in something which is, in some way, true or ideal.”
It’s not far, then, from faith.
“It says in Proverbs, ‘Trust the Lord with all your heart,’” Alice says, “and I find if you do that, it makes sense of life. If you don’t have a sunny disposition, which is my case, it’s tempting to see life as too many things going wrong. But if you trust in the Lord, you begin to see blessings, and you begin to believe in
the future.”
The cousins had so many dogs over the years, Miller can’t even summon a memory of a little brown one called Bingo. But Alice vividly remembers dancing with her. “You’d kneel down and sway, and she’d dance, and when her little paws turned down in your hands, she was done. Bingo was tired.”
Now, listening to her giggle over a game of hide-and-seek with Montgomery, making barricades with boxes and her briefcase and catching him when he decides to explore a paper bag, you forget all the sober boards and charities she serves. She’s on the board of Opera in the Ozarks at Inspiration Point and the membership committee of Washington University’s Eliot Society, and she helps judge competitions for the National Federation of Music Clubs.
Ten years ago, another parishioner at Pillar, Shirley Hoemeke, watched Alice graciously accept every request for her time and help. “She’d be great for your board,” she told her husband, lawyer Bob Hoemeke, who was then president of the St. Louis Society for the Blind and Visually Impaired. He hesitated; they both knew Carmelita, and they could guess how she would feel about that. But Shirley urged him to at least ask, and Alice accepted instantly. She was at home in the larger world now; strangers’ perceptions could no longer limit her.
She’s since chaired the board’s policy and strategic planning committees, and in 2010, she became the society’s first blind president.
Now she keeps her successor, David Ekin, on his toes. “She keeps abreast of technology and Braille, and anytime anything comes out, we have to get it,” he says. “She just says, ‘We don’t have an option!’ She pushes: How can we do more? She’s always one step ahead, answering a question before it’s even asked.”
Asked her flaws, he says that “at times, she wants to move faster than other people are ready to move. But she’s very open to reasons to slow down, and she recognizes the importance of bringing people along. She makes people comfortable. And she dispels so many myths.”
“Color,” Alice says, “is very important, because I would stand out if I used color inappropriately and wore this [red suit] to a funeral. People would say, ‘Oh, the poor dear, she doesn’t know.’ I understand what colors convey. Red can be celebratory: Christmas, Pentecost. Black is a good business color. If you’re thinking, ‘I don’t know if this top is going to go with brown or gray,’ wear black. Turquoise is a good color, because it brings out my eyes, and they’re not a good feature. Pink is a nice color for me, because my complexion is light. And if you’re going to wear navy, you better make sure you don’t interact with Montgomery!” (He sheds.)
I ask if there’s a difference in the amount of vanity in those who aren’t sighted.
“Absolutely,” she says. “I have more of it.”
She knows she’s looked at a little more than most people, sometimes because she’s using a cane, but also because of her job’s fairly high profile. “So I want to always be sure to look as good as I can. In a strange way, I feel I’m representing blind people. I don’t want someone to look at me and generalize that all blind people have bad hair days or can’t put colors together.”
Luckily, she loves to shop for clothes: “If I need endorphins, I go to the mall!” She brings a friend she trusts for feedback. Usually she’s shopping for work or church. “I like to buy evening dresses, too, of course, but you don’t buy as many of them,” she says. “And I also spend too much money on eau de cologne. And I have to buy more shoes than I want to, because sometimes I will scuff them, and I don’t like to wear scuffed shoes. And jewelry, but it’s just costume. My stuff is just thoroughly petit-bourgeois.”
Sounding like a bad women’s fashion magazine, I ask how she matches her separates and accessories so perfectly.
“When I bring clothes home, I segregate them. I can say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s the red suit.’ And I have a color tester. It’s about the size of a candy bar, and it borrows from paint-chip technology. You put it up against something and it tells you what color it is. It has no word for off-white—it calls it foggy gray—and if I get hot, my neck is ‘fuchsia.’”
She’s laughing, clearly enjoying the gadget’s quirks. “Well, it’s so fun,” she says, “’cause it is feedback about color. I have two skirts that look exactly alike to me, but one is navy and one is black.”
“You use the word ‘look’ a lot,” I comment, surprised.
“Well, everyone else does,” she says. “Any other word might distance me from people. It would be less natural.”
There’s something innocent about Alice Conway, something so fresh it almost seems like naiveté, although to think her naive would be folly, because she’ll outwit you in the next second. She reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates: a daughter well loved by her parents, refined and purposeful, with a cool, sharp mind that’s never been dragged through wild escapades or distorted by vices and addictions. She grasps the world’s dark ironies but does not dwell on them.
When I ask how she relaxes, she tells me about her latest Cardinals game. “It was great—pitchers’ duel between Carpenter and Cueto,” she exults. “We won, 1-to-0, thanks to Hamilton driving in the run, and great defensive work by Jay and others.”
But at home, alone?
“I eat at the microwave and feed my soul at the dining-room table. Teresa of Ávila. Thomas Merton. Augustine’s Confessions. And if I’m absolutely dead, I’ll just put the guinea pig on my chest. But I like what I do, so I don’t have that much need to absolutely chill and do nothing. I am so blessed to have Monsanto as an employer. The people are extremely intelligent, hardworking, ethical, and collaborative, and office politics are as minimal as they are anywhere in the world.
“I love to tell clients, ‘That was brilliant, the way you handled that,’” she says. “I’m also a perfectionist, though. If I don’t watch it, I can have way too many comments: ‘You might do this; you ought to do that; take this word out and substitute that one.’”
Her mother died in 2000, which must have been a wrenching grief. But by then, because of Carmelita, Alice was thoroughly independent. I ask how she eventually answered her mother—what does she believe is her purpose on this earth?
“I just hope that I’m useful,” she says simply.
“What would tell you if you were veering off course?”
“If I took it easy. If I didn’t care which way things turned out. If I somehow lost my sense of advocacy. That would be calamitous.”
I’ve been reading about blindness and how some blind people can still register light nonvisually. Can Alice? “If the light produces heat, I experience light as heat,” she replies, then adds dryly, “There’s probably a lawyer joke embedded in that concept.”
Can she do anything that parallels “visualizing,” inside her mind? “I can sit here right now and daydream that I’m holding my little guinea pig, Montgomery, and I can feel his silky hair, and I can hear his little squeak, and I can feel his little feet on my hand,” she says. “If I am thinking about God, I often see the word ‘God’ under my fingers.”
Last summer, she went to Ireland with Miller and her husband, and they dragged her, sandwiched between them, up 100-plus steps to hang backward over the parapet and kiss the Blarney Stone. Now, as she takes my arm to navigate a tricky passage, I think with a pang about how many people she has to trust.
It’s not, however, blind trust. “What can be very expressive, without someone intending it to be, is their jacket,” she remarks. “It will rustle, and buttons will touch a table, if someone quickly leans forward because for the first time you are saying something interesting, because you have said something that concerns them. And a chair will squeak and creak—if they lean back in a chair, the chair’s going to tell me.”
People who are sighted say “seeing is believing”; for Alice, proof comes by getting the facts. “If someone is saying something inconsistent or speaking too fast and it’s too high-pitched, or they are changing from one sentence that’s very formal to the next very informal, the only fact you are getting is, ‘There’s a mystery here.’ You can ‘watch’ what people do, notice whether someone is walking past you, restless, and not able to sit down. All the senses provide something, and you size things up and decide whether you think you are being told straight goods or someone is working through their own inconsistencies.”
She wasn’t surprised to read a study that showed hearing to be a better guide than seeing, when you’re trying to decide whether someone’s being honest.
And she was delighted to learn that when a blind person reads, their fingers hijack the sight channels in the brain. That means the information gets delivered the same way to the thinking part of the brain. Nothing’s altered in transmission; in other words, there’s no intellectual disadvantage to reading Braille.
I ask whether she feels more vulnerable being blind. “Well, you better not go there,” she says. “If you feel vulnerable, you are setting yourself up for something. You’ve got to be very down-to-earth about life.”
The toughest social situations are “being at a party or in a noisy room and figuring out who’s who,” she says. “You’re standing in a circle of backs, or in a circle of people in little knots who are not about to disengage and talk to you. The key is to just keep smiling and keep calm; nothing will work if you don’t.”
Realizing how visually driven most Americans are, how sight dominates everything we do, I ask what she thinks of our culture—is it too dependent on the sense of sight?
“I’d better not think of it in any way that distances me from it,” she says crisply.
