When Gretchen and Charles Hill adopted their son, the orphanage director “told us that Henry is a game changer – influential, inspirational, game changer,” his mother said.
“I think Henry is all of the above.”
Getting a teen to connect with the literary classics and works of theology can often be a struggle, but not with 17-year-old Henry Hill, of Irvine. He developed that passion on his own. What he needed help with was the access.
Born blind, Hill has lobbied publishing houses and literary sources to get versions of the great works in braille or as audiobooks, and he hopes his efforts will make it easier for his peers to find the passion in reading he has.
“I tell people around me the difficulty it can be in just finding a good translation of Livy’s histories, or Richard Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ or Verdi’s ‘La Traviata,’” Hill said. “I constantly battle people and certain publishing groups just to get a book about King Arthur, and people have the audacity to say to me that it’s great how I know about old books when it’s sort of their fault for not making it accessible in the first place.”
“I don’t know how to make it more plain, or self-evident, that being blind does not allow a lucid entrance into education,” he said.
Hill has committed himself, he said, to the promise that “everyone deserves equal access to knowledge.”
He said he has learned a lot from “the greatest poet,” John Milton.
“Milton was a man who suffered blindness like me, and despite it wrote the greatest epic in English history,” said Hill. “Milton in many ways represents a version of me. Like me he went blind, he persevered and, as an adult, he went on to write ‘Paradise Lost,’ which someday I hope to articulate the wonder of to the world.”
Another inspiration for Hill is simply the “entire realm of old books.”
“The fact that they exist for us to read is an inspiration,” he said. “I find it a wonder that I…
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