Unconfirmed Reports

I recently purchased a pair of corrective spectacles, that I have probably needed for quite some time. I now realise that my long-distance vision had been degenerating - but gradually, so that I barely noticed the details I was losing. I only really became suspicious when I noticed that in playing football I can’t identify my teammates until they start moving (once they do that, every player’s distinctive style of movement makes them identifiable).

I received the spectacles in the post, having bought them on the internet from a Pakistani retailer. The package was stitched up in white cloth, and sealed with a glob of red wax. I’m not sure if it counts as ironic that a company should take its orders in hyper-text transfer protocol, and deliver them with sealing wax. Obviously our age of high technology and automation is somewhat patchy in its distribution.

When I put the spectacles on for the first time, I remained speechless for a few minutes. I had quite literally forgotten how much visual detail is available in the world. Especially the things that you never see close up - the branches of a tree against the sky, the details of the loungeroom ceiling - were quite alien to me in their beauty. They still are, because I have so far found my glasses too strange and alarming to wear them much.

My second strong impression, going out into the street, was: the world looks like a photograph of the world. I had never consciously considered this, but in all the time my eyesight had been degenerating, I had only been seing things in sharp detail when looking at them in photographs. In physical terms, a photograph takes what is far, and brings it close - and what my eyes can no longer do naturally is focus on things more than two metres away. So photography had become my most accurate way of seeing the world; and if Jean Baudrillard wouldn’t have wet himself over that little paradox, he surely would if I told him that to see the world in details now feels to me like looking at a photograph.

As mentioned already, I haven’t yet started wearing the spectacles regularly. I would argue that the visual details of the world are better taken in small doses, so that they might be better appreciated. Conversely, I find too much of this detail somewhat overwhelming. Another argument against spectacles - and I am not trying to make a philosophical point here - is that wearing them reveals a lot of worldly imperfections that I was otherwise spared. I have only just discovered how dusty the windows are in the corridor leading to my office; a colleague who I had always thought to be of fine coiffure is now revealed to be balding.

I’m not quite sure whether getting the spectacles was a good thing, since I now notice my visual impairment much more keenly. By way of analogy: did anyone ever feel the need for a high-definition television before they were invented?