Jo Carolyn Anzalone

The Cavern of Deep Harmony Jo Carolyn Anzalone

Born blind and you've never seen the world when suddenly something happens making it vital to understand what seeing... is. Is there a way to do it?

Dr. Marshall Sinclair, a university literature professor in Pittsburgh, finds himself thrust into the necessity and the impossibility. A brilliant, complex, educated, competent man, his comfortable concepts turn upside down. The Cavern of Deep Harmony, a phrase used by Victor Hugo describing a controversial aspect of blindness, is the story of the development of a deep and abiding love between Marshall and Eden, a widow met in extraordinary circumstances at an inn while on sabbatical to write a novel set in Colonial Williamsburg. Discouraged about writing his sighted main character, Eden joins him and their Williamsburg story about a young Englishman arriving in Virginia just before the war and falling in love with a blind woman, is told in the book as they write. The Cavern of Deep Harmony is an exploration of the world of the born blind, Marshall's attempts to help Eden understand his concepts, of what it means to him to venture to invite a woman to share that world as his wife. Eden herself must deal with the fact that the man she loves will never see her, will never comprehend the world she lives in as she struggles to understand as much of his as possible. It is a story of courage, perseverance, tenderness, sacrifice, but above all, the power of selfless love.