ABSTRACT
One of my earliest encounters with art was when, as a young and curious child, I was leafing through the pages of an old illustrated journal. There I found a reproduction of Rembrandt's etching of 1654, representing Tobit, Tobias's father (fig. 1). The apocryphal story tells of the old and blind Tobit whose son went on a long and dangerous journey. The father, preoccupied with thoughts about death, doubts whether the son will return from the journey and whether he is still alive. When Anna, Tobit's wife, "espied him [the son] coming," she tells the good news to the blind father. Tobit hastens to the door to meet his son. But he is blind. "And Tobit went forth toward the door, and stumbled," says the Book of Tobit (11:11), The Dutch Bible, as Julius Held has noted, is even more explicit. It reads: "And Tobias went to the door and hit himself against it."1 When I first saw the etching, on that early day in my life, I did not know the story. Nor had I seen a blind person from nearby, though some uncanny stories about blindness had been told to me. Unprepared, then, as I was, the image struck me so powerfully that I still remember that first encounter.
