On not seeing well
Here in New England the fall color show can come at you fast. On a recent walk I was startled by the tufts of red and yellow that adorned some nearby branches. Other trees were further along: their trunks bullseyed the ground through haloes of orange cotton-candy haze. It could have been an Impressionist masterwork.
Seriously, everything was a bit blurry. I could not make out individual leaves; I could see only cloudy patches of pure color. Oh!—the weaker-than-normal glasses I use for reading were still on my face. Street signs were illegible, which was definitely a downside, but I cannot say that the effect, overall, was unpleasant.
Declining eyesight snuck up on me, but that was a long time ago. I remember the vision tests in elementary school, and being proud of my 20/20 scores. I also remember, a few short years later, sitting in the back row, and asking the kid next to me, over and over, what the teacher was writing on the chalkboard. Somehow, it never occurred to me that the problem was my eyes.
Eventually someone found this unacceptable, and I was taken to an optometrist. On the return visit I got my first pair of glasses. This is a vivid memory: walking outside, and looking at the trees, and being utterly shocked when the foliage greeted me, not as a smear of green, but as individual, individually-visible leaves. They jiggled in the windy gusts like a drunken hypnotist’s pendulum. Reader, I stared.
This story must be common, because my wife has told me that she had the exact same experience, and what are the chances? But I really became a vision perfectionist. When it was time to check my prescription, and the optometrist did his "which is better? One, or two?" routine, I sweated like I was taking the SAT. I would ask to see each choice two, three, four more times. To me, “do you notice a difference?” meant “it is possible to notice a difference if you try as hard as one can." I was the over-eager subject in a psychology experiment, determined to tell red 10001 from red 10002.
My prescription was updated regularly, and every time I put on a new pair of glasses I looked at the smallest writing at the farthest distance—say, the spine of a thin book across a long room—and if it was the least bit blurry, I would go back and complain. I remember once, at boy scout camp, canoeing at night and looking up at the sublime sky and seeing the stars not as points of white light but as red-blue dipoles (the curve of my lenses inevitably separated the colors), and thinking: when I get home, I need to have a word with the glasses guy about this. Later, in high school, I was on the tennis team, and since tennis does not top the list of glasses-friendly sports, I asked about laser surgery. My optometrist, who knew me pretty well by then, advised against it, on the grounds that surgery could never correct my vision as well as glasses. (What about contact lenses? That’s another essay.)
For my overdoing it, and for the ensuing ratchet effect, I blame the doctors. The perfect vision I demanded required a prescription that was a little too strong, but they gave it to me. As my eyes and brain adapted, achieving perfection would require another small increase. I was an adult by the time a (better) eye doctor warned me of this danger, but by then the damage had been done.
When I started teaching philosophy I would sometimes have lunch with an older colleague, and he was constantly changing one pair of glasses for another, or else saying that he did not have on the right glasses for this or that. Young and naive, I did not understand. Later I had children, and at a wedding one of them was strapped to my chest, and during a lull I went to check his scalp for “cradle cap,” and I noticed I had to lean back to focus. I once overheard my father, leaning back as he tried to read the newspaper, joke to a friend that he did not need different glasses, just longer arms. But I knew my time had come. The whole concept of bifocals made little sense to me, so I proposed to my doctor two sets of glasses, one for reading, one for distance, and he was very enthusiastic. Once I obtained the glasses, though, I found changing one pair for another a chore. Since I read for a living, the reading glasses tend to muscle in on the other pair’s territory. And that is how, for me, accepting the imperfections of life and reality came not through some grand inner declaration made in the face of the void, but by an absentminded settling for convenience.