07-11-2023

Last month I was on a walk in New Haven (before graduation and my move to D.C, to name the least of my recent life-altering experiences). Something caught my eye, some flash of movement. It was not close at hand but far up the street, at least at the end of the block. I didn’t clock whatever it was, but I found myself scanning the deep center of the picture plane that is what my eyes see, and became aware of this sensation in real time. With this came a sort of epiphany. It may sound stupidly obvious, but I felt I was seeing this spatial dimension for the first time. Far sight. For the rest of my walk, I focused my attention on the far distance— the block, one which I’d walked countless times over and which, if I am being honest, had become fairly banal and tiresome, was born anew.

About a week after this moment of clarity, I went for an eye exam. Before going, I went on a research spiral around how optometrists work, and how often they might wrongly prescribe someone’s corrective vision— I’ve been taken aback by their casual and happy-go-lucky demeanor on past visits. (I wonder how many times "Optometrist" and "Happy-Go-Lucky" have shared a sentence). Over-prescription is quite common, actually. Worse, it encourages our eyes, those of us who are myopic, to further extend, in order to meet the sharpness of the image projected onto our retina, resulting in something ominously termed, and I might be misremembering it here, “Ocular Creep.”

At the actual exam, I got confirmation of this by the doc. She was asking the age-old question “Which is better, 1…or 2?” To which I replied the requisite answer: I couldn’t tell. She opted for the lower dose, citing the same concerns of over-prescription.

Day to day, I now realize how CLOSE I am looking all the time. The computer screen. The phone screen. The desk in front of me, the people walking in the opposite direction on the street, the facades of buildings I pass. My attention is claimed by a sphere of 20 or so feet around my head. Probably closer to 3 feet.  All of us office-bound, vision-conscious workers are familiar with the “20-20-20 rule”. But what about beyond 20 feet, or beyond even the “far looking” I’ve been doing in the city? How rarely I gaze at truly FAR vistas, at the stars. Is this a great shrinking of our environment? As our “information” increases exponentially and into smaller and smaller “bits”, becoming further and further abstracted, does our physical body follow suit? An abstract human body, shaped by not physical environment but evanescent information...

This physiological change, the lengthening of our eyeballs, feels connected to others driven by “modern life”: our increasing overbites, our crowded teeth, our shrinking jaws. Our collapsing nasal cavities, our habitual and deathly mouth-breathing. I’ve been an obsessive nose-breather for months now, yet I still revert to the mouth if I am not careful. Again, information: breathing through our mouths must be tied to all our talking, no?

To come to an end of my rambling: I recommend you try far-looking and looking long in your daily life, if not to challenge our increasing “close” sphere, then for the increased range of poetry and aesthetics one can experience in experientially tired spaces: to find new joys in old places.