“There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked.”
— Franz Kafka

Six years ago, I opened my raw eyes and began to really look at what they see. I had lived until then for more than two decades with eyeglasses and contact lenses, correcting severe nearsightedness and astigmatism. I had always understood vision simply: as a matter of bad and good, wrong and fixed, with shades running worse to better, like a Martha Stewart paint chart runs from Paris Pink to Hollyhock Red. I’d spent scores of hours in medical chairs at the back of optical shops, my chin tucked into a piece of fitted metal, my forehead pressed up against a cold rim. I stared wide-eyed at black characters against white light, the holy pyramid of ophthalmology. The doctor would click the dials and ask: “Which is clearer? One ...” — click — “... or two?” More clicks. “OK, now which is better, three ...” — click — “... or four?” Sometimes the differences were subtle, but I never wondered what “clear” was.

I’m at my desk now, wearing the glasses that resulted from my most recent exam, and enjoying the precision they afford me. On the computer screen, I can see the curves and dashes of every character: the dewdrop apostrophe, the skinny I staking out its lonely ground, the playful j snaking underneath the n in enjoy like a girl nudging her boyfriend under a restaurant table. In the kingdom of my room, I am a sultan in leisurely possession of every visual detail — every label on every product I own, every angle on every crack of light.

But over the last six years, I’ve been conducting an experiment with vision in which I occasionally abdicate this power. I’ve gone whole days without my glasses. I’ve walked through the woods without them. I’ve laid my fingers on the computer keyboard, going by touch, deliberately blind to the exacting world, longing to be open to one that lies beside it, where I might discover a different kind of clarity.

My experiment started by accident on a lousy Saturday in April 2001. The night before, I’d come home to New York City from my Uncle Herbert’s funeral and called a girl I was sleeping with. She came over, and I came to life. With an object of desire before my eyes, I could be playful, even ferocious. But when she left, my hope began to drain, like a lake poked in the bottom by a manhole.

The next morning, I felt sour. I hated everything. I was on amphetamines in those days, taking 20 milligrams of Dexedrine by psychiatrist’s prescription for long-standing depression and dissociative disorder. The Dexedrine had injected me with new energy. I didn’t slump into bed during the day, and I hung on at parties past the initial fright. But this new energy could turn dark, too. My lows were angry and wild. Once, I stomped my heel into the soft wood belly of an acoustic guitar.

This April day, I went out to run some errands, but I felt an emotional storm coming on. I needed to take shelter. When the bus came east on Fourteenth Street, I stomped onto it and rode to First Avenue, where I walked south and turned left on Tenth Street, heading east again toward the Russian & Turkish Baths.

From the outside, the place is just ordinary tenement brick. But the scene inside sends you back to the 1890s, when it was built. On the first floor, enormous men roam around in robes, speaking Russian, eating pickles, and looking indifferent. Downstairs, they sweat, joined by hipsters, misfits, and waifs, by bankers, models, and Hasids — the whole New York carnival. I’d found this place a year or so before, and it had become a refuge, a place to go with friends or to suffer alone and hope for healing.

Stripping in the locker room, tugging at my jeans and T-shirt, I noticed a problem sitting on the bridge of my nose. In the steam heat of the Russian baths, glasses are no good. They fog up, for one, and the metal hinges absorb the molecules from the furnace. Then they burn like fuck. Ordinarily, I’d have put contact lenses on in advance, but I hadn’t gone home to get them. I felt betrayed by the material world. I honestly thought it was unfair that I couldn’t be both impulsive and well-equipped. I needed to float in the heat. I needed a wide berth from my body. But now I’d be carrying around my folded-up glasses like a portable wheelchair.

I suppose I should describe my vision. I’ve said that I have severe myopia, which is nearsightedness, and astigmatism, which means I see things blurry. In my last eye exam, I asked the optician if he could compare me to the 20/20 standard. This was at the end of the exam, and he had already pulled away the octopus of diagnostic lenses and given me my glasses back. He asked me to take them off again and flashed some new letters on the screen, steadily increasing in size. Could I read them? “No,” I said. “No.” “No again.” He got up to a letter that seemed to be the height of an encyclopedia spine. I was about eight feet away from it. I could see the parallel lines enough to guess “E.” But the lines were floating and doing a jitterbug. He told me that if I could read that E I’d be 20/400. That was the worst vision he could measure in this setting. He said he guessed I was about 20/600.

So that gives you a sense of the power of the curved pieces of plastic I wear. On dates, girls take my glasses off, look through them, and gasp, scanning the room as if they’re touring a historic prison. “God,” they say, “you’re blind.” I nod and take my glasses back.

Glasses both correct and intensify the problem, because wearing them heightens the feeling of vulnerability. You take them off just before you turn out the light and put them on in the fumbling dawn. A feeling of intense attachment develops, of need and nakedness. It’s weird without them, be it in the shower, or even in the dark. Wander around a crowded public bathhouse without my glasses? Are you crazy?

But I was desperate. I grew resolved. I put on shorts and sandals and shut my locker. I grabbed three fresh towels and a robe and descended the steep, narrow staircase. Downstairs, in the passage between the four heated rooms, I hung the robe on a hook, put the towels on the bench underneath it. And I took my glasses off and folded them on top of the towels.

As I moved toward the heat, I didn’t stumble or make a fool of myself. It was just the opposite. I felt a release, a sense of openness and awareness of the environment, and a peaceful indifference to the nonessential details. Even as I remember it now, I feel my shoulders loosen and my neck pull up from its usual slump to a commanding height. As I walked, my hips gave me their full motion, so it felt less like my usual anxious plod and more like a glide over to the showers, where I squeezed the soap dispenser and lathered my face and up under my armpits, closing my eyes under the nozzle like a dog and wiping the water away with my open palm.

The Russian room, the main room, back then had jagged stone walls, as if it were cut from the bedrock itself. A lone lightbulb hung over the thick, wood door. Rows of benches, pitted with pebbles, proved rough on your ass — and hot, too, unless you found one of the thin, wooden boards around or poured cold water on the bench from one of the white plastic buckets under the open faucets.

I sat on the bench facing the fire pit. I took a deep breath and looked at the jagged wall. It seemed to be missing something — missing the crisp edges, the clear gradations of light that create depth and contour. But somehow it seemed more complex and interesting, not less. It looked to be in motion. I felt as if I were looking at a live, three-dimensional Rothko painting.

Then, to my right, the door swung open, light spilled into the room, and with it the form of a girl. My eyes darted over to follow her. If I had my glasses, I’d have looked at her as if she were in a magazine — the shape of her lips, the light of her eyes, the tone of her skin. I’d look at her like a sick junkie, like a bad cop. I’d look until I found something unattractive. That discovery would release me into myself again, but if I didn’t find it, and often I didn’t, the mere sight of her would incite an idea of her, and that idea would reach through me into my gut, and scoop out a hole the size of a cantaloupe.

But this day, I lacked the means. I couldn’t tell whether she was pretty or homely, old or young. All I could see was that she was female, that she had hips, that she had hair. My gaze on her was soft as she sat down on a bench across from me. It was as if, deprived of precise visual acuity, I could actually see the essential thing — that she was separate from me, that the usual waves of yearning and fear were products of my own internal system.

Over the next few hours, I found that I could move into those feelings and not drown, or suffocate, or choke. I had what I needed. I couldn’t read the face of the clock above the cold pool. But I didn’t need to be anywhere. I couldn’t see the headlines on the newspaper page crumpled on the bench. But what I needed was to read the old headlines of my own longings.

Six years later, it’s still what I need.

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In a dream, I am at my uncle’s house in San Diego running down a road in his subdivision. I have my glasses in my hand. My face is wet, the air smells like pinecones, like meat cooking, like dogs barking. My temples ache. It’s as if someone is standing over me and driving their fingers into my temples hard, although this is not possible, because I am running. Nearing the end of the run, I see three streetlights, yellow lights on poles, one after another. The yellow drips, moves, glows. I start to sprint for the last pole. I pass the first one, and the second one, but the last one flickers in and out, in and out. I can’t reach it, no matter how hard or fast I run.

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Back in the April air after the Russian baths, I grew philosophical. I had worn glasses for as long as I could remember, and I always felt lucky that such a grave problem could be so readily fixed. Better to be born without good eyes, I figured, than without a leg. Better astigmatism than cystic fibrosis. In the same vein, I sometimes wondered about my fate had I lived before the era of precision lenses. I thought of blurry-sighted cavemen cowering in the face of threats they could hardly recognize, and eventually, I guessed, being eaten or something.

But now, my feet light on the sidewalks among the pigeons and cafés, I reconsidered. Were these ill-sighted cavemen invalids? Probably, yes; they didn’t hunt or gather or menace enemies. But maybe they considered matters beyond the flesh. Maybe they were medicine men or shamans. Perhaps, not being able to see, they were visionaries.

Tiresias, the blind seer in Greek myth, followed this pattern exactly. In Oedipus the King, for example, it is Tiresias who spells out the truth for the tragic young man who has killed his father and married his mother (provoking Oedipus to blind himself in grief). Tiresias can see beneath deceiving surfaces into the hidden depths.

As it turns out, many of history’s great creators have had the same curse — and the same gift — of afflicted sight. Emily Dickinson had a genetic ocular disorder called strabismus; it affected her most severely in her early thirties, at the time her poetry bloomed. James Joyce was nearly blind when he wrote Ulysses. Same with Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. Cézanne, one among many great painters, suffered from myopia. Offered eyeglasses, he is said to have declared, “Take away those vulgar things!”

What would you do to see like Cézanne?

Yet today, the hills and valleys of idiosyncratic sight are being flattened. Nearly 1.3 million Americans get Lasik surgery every year. They lie awake as a laser slices into their corneas, reshaping them according to the industry standard. One Lasik recipient wrote about it for Washingtonian Magazine: “I can see,” she wrote. “In the shower. At the beach. In the middle of the night on my way to the kitchen or bathroom. For the first time since I was six years old, I can see.” Reading this, I wanted to ask her, what is it you need to see so clearly in the shower? Do you amuse yourself by reading the ingredients of your shampoo? Do you inspect the grout around your tub, searching for hairline fractures?

But few people seem to question whether ever-sharper, ever-more-precise vision is an unmitigated good. Lasik is only the most recent technology drawing us into a more mechanical conception of vision. Some centuries back, the very word vision referred to moments of transcendence from physical sight, such as in dreams or in rapture. In the fourteenth century, vision came to mean “something that is seen by the eye but that is not actually present, usually as a form of ‘supernatural insight.’” The last meaning, the present one, simply “faculty of sight,” came in the fifteenth century.

The fifteenth century is just the time when modern eyeglasses emerged.

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In a sense, I’m trying to go back. In the summer of 2001, three months after my experience at the Russian baths, I spent some time at an artist’s colony in New Hampshire. Every once in a while, I left the piles of books and three-ring binders and manuscript pages in my studio and went out into the woods without my glasses. It took me time, sitting on a mossy rock and waving ineffectually at mosquitoes, to let go again. I had to stop focusing so hard and look at the whole field. Eventually, I fell into a rhythm with the tall, thin trees, which swayed in the wind like melancholy teenagers at a Smashing Pumpkins concert. I lost the sense of separation between objects. I almost began to sway myself.

A few years later, I spent twenty-four hours in New York City without my glasses. That morning, I watched the steam rise from my mug of tea, saw the shape of it. I could almost see the molecules cooling and taking their place in the room air. As I left my apartment building, an old brownstone in Brooklyn, the panels of the doors downstairs looked like two big eyes looking out onto the street. Here I was, perched on the edge of adventure. I rode in the front of the subway, looking out the front window onto the tracks. I made a pilgrimage to the West Side for an Italian sub and, when I bit into it, began to dance with pleasure. At the Museum of Modern Art, van Gogh’s Starry Night came alive. In the afternoon sun, I encountered a stop sign; its fiery red shape and abstract white brush marks, apparently suspended in the air, made me feel invigorated. Ready to go. When I came home that night, I realized I’d gone the whole day without seeing a single advertisement.

These experiments gave me a glimpse of freedom and excitement. Yet what to do then? I always put my glasses on again. I always returned to the work on my book, to the small print of newspapers and Google searches and card catalogues. I could never figure out how to reconcile these two alternating worlds — the poetic view of strange sight and the scientific view of sober detail. Indeed, I found my very investigation into vision hung up between these two poles. I began to doubt the significance of my own tame experience. So I checked out library books, copied out passages, conducted interviews.

The new knowledge sent me spinning. For example, Aldous Huxley argues, in The Art of Seeing, that putting glasses on a child with trouble seeing is like putting a permanent cast on a child with a broken leg, denying the body its chance to heal.

Even more fundamentally challenging is the fact, explained to me by David C. Lindberg, a historian of visual science, that when we look at the world, we don’t see reality at all. “This is the naive popular view,” says Lindberg, “that if you look at something, you see what’s there. And if you listen to something, you hear what’s there.” Actually, Lindberg says, we create whole images by processing pieces of data and interpreting them according to a set of rules. “We respond to little bits in the world out there,” Lindberg says. “We fill it in from our own consciousness.”
And it turns out that the very consciousness of sight is a mystery. We can trace the process only in part by following the concrete stimuli — the light bouncing off objects into our eyes; the cornea shaping the angle of the light and the pupil regulating the amount of light before the lens projects it onto the retina; the retina converting the image into electrical impulses, which are rushed to the brain’s visual cortex. Aspirants for precision may find this science comforting. But here’s the problem. According to Gary Hatfield, cofounder of the interdisciplinary Visual Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania, we still don’t know how the cortex actually creates what we see, a problem that can only be addressed by a blend of combination of neuroscience, optics, and philosophy.

Which makes me wonder: if sight is not only a construction, but a construction we fail to understand, by what criteria do we determine when vision is good? If we are capable of processing vast amounts of visual data, but actually end up seeing only the most narrow slices, how do we know what’s a distortion, what’s the truth?

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I live now in a small town, and I rent a house at the edge of a river. In my writing room, the front wall is glass. Just now, I laid my spectacles down on my desk and took a seat at the center of the room. As I look out, I see patches of light and patches of shadow, both softly pointed at the edges. Everything is soft. The lawn rolls softly to the water and disappears into it, and the water rolls softly to the trees on the other bank, where the trees give way at their tops, softly, to the sky, which is a pale, pale orange, just the sweetest and lightest color. A motorboat skims by, leaving in the water a trail of bubbles like a kid would blow in the bath.

Without my glasses, I am drawn toward the whole, and my thoughts tend to amble. When I look up at a tree, I see its firm trunk. I see its height. I see its branches as long, green arms, turning over gently like a dancer’s. I am seeing the organism in its autumn, the creature sucking up the last bits of chlorophyll before the fall. It is rooted, and it lifts in the breeze, breathing.

And I’m so clear about how I feel. It’s like being a baby. You see your mother and her breast. Into the view edges another face — father. And then back to mother, no word for her, just her, and her breast. You feel glad. You feel hungry. You feel scared. I feel sad this morning. I miss my big brothers. I wish they were here with me and we could play football like we never did, running and throwing a ball, and crashing into each other on a big empty lawn like this.

And that passes. I mean the sadness passes, the sadness at longing for joy. A quiet returns. The world stays soft.

In a moment, I’ll put on my glasses and everything will snap up, come to attention. It’ll go from a lazy Sunday on the beach to the barracks at 5 am on a Monday, when the staff sergeant comes in clanging a steel garbage can with its lid. I’ll be able to see all my typos and correct them. And I’ll be able to check my e-mail, too, and get up and go out into the world. I don’t want to go back there, not with this split in me. I wish the sky would open, and thunder would crack, and the heavens would pour down rain that washed out my eyes and gave me my true sight. Until then, I will just have to keep looking, and waiting. Two red birds just landed on my lawn, then flew away. &