Word: walkathon
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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When the boys are not in class, they link arms in twos and threes and shuffle through the yards and corridors in a kind of endless walkathon. Always there are the unseen eyes of the attendants, and only the best of them rattle their keys to let the boys know they are coming. The keepers' special concern: sex, natural and unnatural. In a brilliant set piece that has the spectral, hallucinatory quality of a Poe short story, Author Bjarnhof tells of a boy who made contact with the well-guarded girls' wing of the institute. Like ghosts...
...Endless Walkathon. Would-be philanthropic heavens too often become pluperfect hells. Just into his teens, the hero in The Good Light still has partial vision, but the first thing that assails him at the Blind Institute is the smell - paint, sour beer, and wet floor mops. The food is stale bread, dry cheese and gruel that the sightless inmates wolf down like animals. When the boy says good morning to his schoolmates, no one turns a head. He has entered a world in which nothing exists until it is touched...