What is blindness? What does it mean to be blind or not today? On the occasion of his first book launch party Look without looking, on November 4 at the National Institute for Young Blind People (Inja) in Paris, British writer Sélina Mills suggested thinking about this. Blind since birth and suffering from cataracts that will soon rob him of his sight, he is quickly faced with the gaze of others, as if this announcement also marks the end of his life. “Why should loss of sight always be considered a tragedy?” he asked in front of thirty people, most of them blind, gathered in the Inja auditorium.
The starting point of his work found its source at a dinner at the university. During the conversation, an archaeologist told him about the existence of a skeleton from the Neanderthal era in the Middle East, who was most likely blind during his lifetime. Nicknamed Nandy, he could also live more than forty-five years, while life expectancy at that time did not exceed thirty. For archaeologists, this man’s survival is still shrouded in mystery
