Michael: What about visual imagining? If you meet someone new, do you create a detailed picture of their face? Or if you listen to a novel on tape, can you easily visualize the scenes as they are described?
Joel: The answer to the second question is easier. Having experienced the world with unimpaired vision until middle age, I form mental images of descriptive prose as well and as readily as ever. My imagination is informed by rich, durable visual memory of things. Meeting people is quite different. It's only in the last two or three years that I've been unable to see someone's face as much more than a shadow or, under bright light, a flesh-colored blur. For the people I've met during this period, including some who are good friends now, I try hard to conjure up some sort of features, but all I manage, and that very fleetingly, is something like a crude police sketch. Sometimes I ask someone I trust to describe someone for me, and I plug key elements--sensual mouth, intelligent eyes, whatever--into the sketch to give it some specificity.
Michael: When I think about you, or if somebody says your name, an image of your face washes across the little screen inside my head, along with a kind of muted echo of the sound of your voice and maybe some flashes of little scenes, like the Cuban restaurant where we last got together. When you're thinking about one of your newer friends whose face you've never seen, what is the immediate qualitative experience for you? I'm guessing that you carry some sense of the person that's unique to them and is more immediate and visceral than your police sketch.

Joel: Ah, the internal audio-visual department. Hard-wired to memory, ready at a millisecond's notice. Seriously, as I still see, though with a muted, kaleidoscopic fragmentation, I pick up a lot of visual clues about a person. Physique, body language, clothing style and fit, and more. I even catch the face if I look away, though I can't claim to have "seen" it in the normal sense. So when I think of people more recently become part of my life, I have your same experience but perhaps with the person's voice a bit more prominent in the mix, along with those other faintly-seen details. In my imagination, I reflexively strain to picture the face, but of course draw something from a shadow to that police sketch, depending on my creative energy level, if you'll pardon the expression. I was thinking the Yiddish "coyach," meaning, roughly, "strength of spirit for coping."