"The Country of the Blind"

There is a short story by H.G. Wells that I read a long time ago called "The Country of the Blind", where a mountain climber came upon an isolated remote community which was entirely blind. They lived there for several generations and what happened was that for some reason all their babies were born blind, until several generations later there wasn't a single sighted person left.

So because the mountain climber could see, he had this proverb repeating on a loop in this head, "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is King". That was not how it worked out, however. The villagers had no concept of sight, so they thought that all of this man's strange ideas were a product of his sick imagination.

After living there for a while (he thought it was impossible for him to get back home), he fell in love with a girl there and asked for her hand in marriage. But the elders of the village refused, until he agreed to give up his sight in order to rid him of his deluded ideas. He reluctantly agreed, but the day of the supposed ceremony he escaped when everyone was sleeping (being blind, they worked at night when it was colder, and slept during the day when it was warmer), and as he was running and climbing away he realized that the farther away he got from that village, the more distant became the memory of the girl he loved.

Anyway, the ending of the movie really reminded me of this story. 😊

And the story really packs a punch - read it if you haven't yet.