How we underestimate the many forms of violence! In 1978, Hugues de Montalembert interrupted two thugs robbing his apartment. When they saw there was no money, he remembers, their actions turned ugly. 'While I was fighting with the big one,' he recalls, 'the little one threw paint remover in my face.' His eyesight dissolved almost immediately: 'By the morning I was blind.' During rehabilitation, Montalembert learned new ways of seeing. He describes this process with a beautiful, grace-filled simplicity. After seven months, he felt confident enough to walk alone in the street. He memorizes the textures of Madison Avenue -- the curbs, the rubber matting in front of the Carlyle Hotel. And then he began traveling everywhere -- Singapore, Jakarta, Bali, Greenland -- to 'confront myself with a visually violent landscape, to force my brain to see.' Memories take on new visual qualities. 'At times I am afraid,' he writes, 'that the memory I have of the visible world will disappear little by little, to be replaced by an abstract universe of sound, smell, and touch.' Montalembert believes in destiny. 'Invisible' has a purity, a clarity that is truly inspiring. 