Second Sight When John Howard Griffin was an Air Force sergeant in the South Pacific in 1944, a bomber caught fire on the ground. It exploded as Griffin was running toward it. Two weeks later, enemy bombs fell near the base, and Griffin gradually lost his sight. Doctors laid this to a blockage of circulation in arteries supplying the eyes. After the war, Griffin turned to writing books, which he dictated on a wire recorder, notably The Devil Rides Outside, a 1952 success about a man’s tortured search for God in and out of a monastery. Three years ago he married, without ever seeing his wife or, later, their two children.

Last week, as Griffin walked alone and unaided from his workshop to the house on his parents’ farm outside Mansfield,

Texas, he began to see again for the first time in ten years.

Knowing that many cases of apparent blindness are relieved by a shock, Griffin explained: “There was no bump, no jar. Nothing had happened. Suddenly everything looked like red sand in front of my eyes.” By the time a doctor arrived, Griffin could make out the color of his blue suit and read a prescription blank. Near shock from the experience, Griffin was put on heavy doses of sedatives, given “cylinder glasses” to help pull his eye muscles back to useful strength. His vision. Griffin estimated, was about 20-150.

Although Griffin belittled the possibility. the only plausible medical explanation of his case was that his blindness had been mainly, if not entirely, hysterical, i.e., brought on by the emotional shock of bomb blasts. Dissolution of a longstanding blood clot could not explain his recovery, as such a clot would soon have caused irreparable damage to the eye’s nerves. Seeing his wife and children for the first time, he said: “They are more beautiful than I ever suspected … I am astonished, stunned and thankful.”

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