As I write this, it is five days since my second eye surgery. In the plus column, this is the first time in nearly fifty years that I have been able to navigate without glasses. Even as a kid I faked my way through school, unable to see the chalkboard—which worked until I hit the brick wall of algebra. I couldn’t see the leaves on the trees or anything else at a distance.
Until now, I scarcely realized what a limiting thing it was to be stuck behind lenses. When I finally started wearing glasses regularly they were my windows on the world—but a window is also a barrier and an additional layer of distortion between one and reality. The lenses don’t even have to be rose-colored to affect what one perceives. Looking at the world through spectacles is not unlike viewing everything on television or through a computer monitor or via smartphone screen.
It’s called a “screen” for a reason. It is designed to obscure as well as reveal. Glasses are portable screens, simultaneously freeing and confining. I have been peering through shop windows my whole adult life, close to objects of desire but at a remove from them. In some ways I’ve always felt like a viewer rather than a participant. I got to watch everyone else have fun—but I also felt that my glasses were safety goggles that kept me at a remove from the danger of possibly enjoying myself.
I always thought “the naked e
