Blind librarians

"In my life I have received many unmerited honors, but there is one which has made me happier than all the others: the directorship of the [Argentinian] National Library...

I received the nomination at the end of 1955.  I was in charge of, I was told, a million books.  Later I found out it was nine hundred thousand - a number that's more than enough...

Little by little I came to realize the strange irony of events.  I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.  Others think of a garden or of a palace.  There I was, the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines...

(re Groussac, another blind library director)  But I knew that there had certainly been moments when our lives had coincided, since we both had become blind and we both loved books.  He honored literature with books far superior to mine.  But we were both men of letters, and we both passed through the library of forbidden books - one might say, for our darkened eyes, of blank books, books without letters.  I wrote of the irony of God...

At the time I did not know that there had been another director of the library who was blind, Jose Marmol.  Here appears the number three, which seals everything.  Two is a mere coincidence; three a confirmation.  A confirmation of a ternary order, a divine or theological confirmation...

---Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay "Blindness," in Seven Nights. 

When I read these comments I couldn't help but be reminded of the classic Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough At Last."