Seeing Differently

It was when I noticed the headmaster's bald pate shining as though he had a sort of halo round his head that I realised something was up with my eyes. That was when I was 16, and since then my 'spec spec' has altered a bit as my eyesight has changed. Over the last couple of years I've found the small print of the Missal we read from at the midweek mass easier to use if I take my glasses off to do so, and depending on conditions that's also the case with the Sunday hymnbook. This is no more than one can expect with advancing age, of course. Very recently, though, my right eye in particular seems to have altered so that its focal range now covers only a couple of inches, and annoyingly a couple of inches which don't coincide with the ones the left one can cover. I can manage for the time being, but doubtless the optician will pick it up the next time I go and perhaps advise a new prescription.

The odd effect of this change, apart from the mild inconvenience, is a psychological one - that, with or without my glasses, the world hardly ever appears completely clear. It's as though I no longer have access to things as they truly are: a strange distance has opened up between me and reality and I can no longer be completely sure what things in themselves are. It's as though I am suddenly more separate than I was before from the landscape through which I move; it becomes a place in which I am a little less at home. Perhaps that, too, is a facet of aging.