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While enjoying Stephen Kuusisto's memoir Eavesdropping, readers find themselves pupils of the rare art of listening. In our daily lives, most of us listen passively in an utterly elementary way: conversing with a friend, waking up to an alarm, using our iPods at the gym. But for Kuusisto, an author, poet, and University of Iowa professor who has been blind since birth, listening is an active process and a finely honed skill. I began reading his book, curious to learn about his perspective as a blind man and how he lives with disability. As I read, however, I learned that, armed with an amazingly keen ear and his steadfast independence, Kuusisto is beyond able.
An unconventional memoir, Eavesdropping is a collection of essays, taking us through the author's life from his boyhood in Finland and New Hampshire to his adult life traveling the world. More than a coming of age story, Kuusisto's essays carried me into his thought process and allowed an intimate look at how he absorbs his surroundings, and why. Describing an experience sitting at an outdoor theater, he explains, “I wanted to be a listener. And by this I meant I wanted to be a happy man” (p. 122). In listening, he seems to find contentment and a feeling of oneness with his environment. But this ability did not come without hardship. As a child, he listened to ice cubes clinking in his mother's whiskey glass and listened to the taunts of bullies he could not see. In his youth, he was forced to learn “how to reclaim the world after these moments by entering a self-made audible environment” (p. 42). And so, throughout the book, his readers accompany him as he travels, actively listening to shape his self and happiness.
Fueled by his unique perception, Kuusisto's writing is delicate yet powerful. Each experience is made uniquely accessible to his readers because of the synesthetic quality of his thought process. Using his astute senses, Kuusisto conveys sightless visions to his audience, infused with powerful emoti