Monday, August 7, 2017

I Can See!

It's difficult to describe the experience of getting new glasses for me.

My vision doesn't change with any great speed, and (with the exception of outright losing them) neither do my glasses.  Whether my eyes get better or worse (they've actually been on a getting better streak) my vision gradually gets worse as my eyes stop matching my prescription and my glasses are ravaged by the twin horrors of time and having me as their owner.

And then, one day, I get new glasses based off of a new prescription that matches how my eyes are right now and . . . the world changes.

It's sort of like switching from craptastic resolution to UHD, if the craptastic were scaled by blurring instead of nearest-neighbor count-the-pixel methods.

It's sort of like switching from 2D to 3D.

It's probably sort of like many things.

But it's exactly like nothing else.  Suddenly the world appears with a focus and clarity that I didn't even know was possible because I lost it too slowly to notice and had forgotten it could look like this.  I mean, I obviously know that it can look better than the prescription before the one I got six years ago (and lost down a toilet) as modified by scuffs and scratches to the lens.  That could almost go without saying.  But that doesn't mean I have a sense of what that looks like.

Part of this is doubtless my very non-imagey imagination.  I can't conjure up a memory of seeing the world correctly that includes how it looks, because I can't conjure up how anything looks.  A sense of how something looks, an idea, a feeling?  Sure.  All those I can do.  But an actual thing to see?  Nope.  Can't do it.

And so when I get new glasses the world I experience changes in a way I find myself ill-equipped to describe.

I can see.  I could see before.  I can see in a way I couldn't see before.

The world is different now.

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