In the following, I invoke the experience of disability, my blindness, and of ageing, and I will show how scientific responses to COVID-19 have rendered the combination of the two not only as a site of vulnerability, but also as a life barely worth living. I will explore how vision together with its sister, the virtual, have diminished touch. Touch has become a method for vision to elevate itself to the ‘master sense’. Vision is thus regarded as the best way to experience the inter-human, constituting blindness, with its ‘master sense’ of touch, as not merely second best, but as beneath notice by and irrelevant to the human project. Finally, I will show how blindness and old age co-mingle and how science has used COVID-19 as the occasion to emphasize the diminished humanity of both.

Austin Clarke once told me that he was ‘getting old’ and that he ‘hated it’. And now, I too am getting old and like Austin, I hate it. When you think about it, really think about it, there isn’t anything good about getting old. And, blindness doesn’t help old age get any better.

One day at a time; live life one day at a time. This is an admonition that old age often casts our way. Harsh as it is, it does seem as though it is our only choice; not that anyone, regardless of age, can live life more than one day at a time. But, in old age – this becomes a conscious choice. Living today as though it were the last day of your life takes on an eerie poignancy in old age. This is captured very well in an old joke; a person of 85 years is asked, “How do you start your day?” They reply, “I read the obituaries in the newspaper. If my name does not appear there, I get out of bed.”

Perhaps the situation is not as drastic as this, but only perhaps. The sense of time being short and quickly passing, as well as the dread of wasting what time remains and the need to grab it as it passes by, haunt us in old age. A lament – I won’t get those two hours back – takes on the brilliance of a clear bitterly cold winter’s day and has the same humbling effect. Time, we realise in old age, is indeed precious.