Featured on PDR in the collection Seeking Enlightenment: Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind (1749)

When James Joyce — who named his daughter “Lucia” after the patron saint of eyesight, hoping for intercession from his degenerating vision — met Marcel Proust in May, 1922, at a Parisian hotel, he chalked up the awkward encounter to the French novelist’s nocturnal lifestyle. “Of course the situation was impossible. Proust’s day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.” Almost two centuries earlier, the Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot visited Puiseaux, just south of Paris, to meet a person “of good solid sense” who had been born blind. Arriving at five in the afternoon, he finds the man amid his morning routine. “He had only been up for an hour, for I must tell you the day begins for him when it is ending…