Psychedelic visions
I have a peephole in the door to my first-floor apartment. It looks down a straight hall to a glass wall framing the front door of my building. For 13 years, its job has been to let me see who is ringing my buzzer and who is making a racket in the hall.
Over time, however, the peephole’s lens turned amber-yellow and frosted-foggy like those headlight protectors on cars. In recent years, it became so clouded that all I could make out were unidentifiable Sasquatch figures moving in a blurry space.
I was startled one day when I peered through the peephole and recognized my UPS person. The view was still blurry, but it was much brighter and clearer than before. Then I realized: I was spying with my right eye. When I switched to my left—the one I normally use—the hole appeared completely blurred, frosted, and yellow. That’s when it hit me: The peephole hadn’t changed; my eyes had. That was the moment I stopped denying I had cataracts. I was functionally blind, I realized, in my left eye. That same hour, I made an appointment with an eye surgeon.
Next thing I knew, I was lying on the operating table. As the doctor removed that Clockwork Orange rig from my eye, I spied the eye-tech gear above me and the lights on the operating room ceiling. Everything was incredibly sharp-focused, aggressively three-dimensional. The white walls looked blue-white and unnaturally bright.
The next morning, the doctor tested my eyes. “Before surgery, you could not see the big ‘E’ at the top of the chart,” the doctor said. “Now you can speed-read the bottom line.”
“Yes Doc, oh my God! Thank you—this new luminous clarity is beyond my wildest dreams. I never thought anyone could see like this. But Doc, nothing looks real! I feel like I am looking through a plastic camera lens. Why is that?” That’s when he told me, “The new lens is clearer than a natural lens,” even when the natural lens is fresh and new.
I got my second
