“Now this blind man was coming to sleep in my house.” After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t even know! And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can only conclude-“ But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape. So I said okay, I’d listen to it…The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud voice. “Once she asked me if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. The kind of correspondence-audiotapes sent back and forth for years (that sounds a lot like some uneasy introduction to prayer!)- makes the narrator queasy about the whole visit to begin with: Robert, the visitor, a blind, recent widower, has had a history of correspondence with the narrator’s wife, who had worked as Robert’s assistant in the past. It begins, though, through the narrator’s lovable perspective, with the blatant understandability of such a thing to feel, well, “upside-down,” alien, creepy.Īn unnamed narrator and his wife are expecting a visitor from out of town, a friend of the wife’s. For anybody who hasn’t read it, “Cathedral” (1982) is probably Raymond Carver’s most famous short story, and provides an endearing picture of what could be called a modern-day, suburban visitation from the upside-down world of grace.
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