The Persistence of Vision is a 1978 short story by John Varley, appearing in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1979 Annual World's Best SF. Set around the year 1988 (in the near future from the author's perspective), a young man decides to skip the long bread lines during yet another "non-depression" and go out on the road. When he gets to New Mexico he discovers and stays at various communes...and travels onward until he reaches a stone wall. Within is a different kind of community, self-supporting and composed of deaf and blind people who had been born that way through an outbreak of rubella measles in the mid-1960s. The residents welcome him and teach him how to communicate with them. What specifically happens next and how it all ends is something you can discover for yourself...this is one of the best short stories I've read and it has definitely opened my mind to all sorts of speculation...
Varley touched upon the regrettable trend in the past to throw the deaf and blind together with the mentally disabled and isolate them from society. In his story, the large group born with this condition gets together and, under the inspired and creative leadership of one woman, builds the special community out west that the story's protagonist encounters. Being human like everyone else...and thus with strong social instincts...they develop an extremely intricate, layered system of communications over the years involving touch. By necessity at first...and then by desire...all sorts of social taboos in the "outside" world get knocked down, and our seeing and hearing traveler has to struggle to overcome his initial resistance to all this. Eventually, he realizes that he is the handicapped one here and can never fully understand all that is being expressed between the others. Finally, there is an eerie element to The Persistence of Vision...the "***" (read as "Star-Star-Star") section...that reminds me of another great science fiction story, Lewis Padgett's 1942 Mimsy Were the Borogoves, in that ultimately the nature of reality and our place in it become matters of focus. Brilliant!
What is the opposite of living a highly active, socially engaged existence without seeing or hearing? I thought about that question a little while and came up with the answer: just sitting there watching television! Yet that is a hallmark of our society...maybe we all could stand for taking at least a little break from that isolating sensory inundation, even if it's only for a few minutes at a time, and shut out the noise and sights. Wonder what we'd find there...
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