EN 203 Guy Tiphane
Prof. A. Davaran March 20, 2002

The Round Glasses

At age 6, I noticed something unusual with my left eye when in church I would not see the parish priest at all looking at him from behind a huge hat. A somewhat inconvenient situation, considering that people listening to a sermon perform a kinetic dance and heads move right to left, left to right, sometimes up and down as they doze. But nothing was done about the myopia until I was eighteen because my right eye had allowed me to get me all the way to college, even passing the depth and perspective test for a driver's license. Seeing me read a book from a less than acceptable distance, my grandmother exclaimed I was losing my sight, that if I went on like that my eyes would fall out of their sockets, and so I should get glasses. An appointment was made with the family's optometrist, measurements taken, a choice between the five available styles determined, and in a week's time I sported new glasses. It made little difference in my vision, the right eye still being the poorer one's guide, but I had become a new person! I could pretend being an intellectual without even pulling a book in the middle of a crowded bus. I could avoid fights, because bullies would never want to bother harassing guys with glasses. The new glasses were the subject of new discussions and bonding with others who had to deal with them as well.

You learn a few tricks about glasses in college, especially once you have joined the ranks of the superior graduate students. First, you need to keep them clean, because not only do greasy glasses with several coats of dust impair your vision, they make you look peculiar. Second, avoid breaking them in the middle because the tape you use to mend them is very visible and risible. A preventive solution to this problem is to get wireframe glasses: they will bend out of shape, but you will be able to bend them back to something close to the original shape. Third, spend part of your graduate scholarship on a new pair.

In the real world, the one you get into with your diploma in hand, you start paying more attention to your appearance and specifically to your glasses. Some people, not finding much decorative attributes to them, switch to contact lenses or even let someone cut the surface of their eyes with a laser. Not me: a lasting impression has been made on me by cartoon characters springing their eyes out of their sockets, and by the eyes of the morlocks in the movie The Time Machine when the hero escapes from them and sees them decomposing as time flies fast forward. Hence, I have decided that nice glasses are as essential as a good pair of shoes for comfort, fashion, and a statement of your personality.

I found my best pair of glasses one good summer morning at an optician’s store. I was out to get round glasses, definitely not the John Lennon model but the smaller kind, you know. They never know, as if I were from planet Mars! After reassuring me that the model name "Colette" did not really mean they were a woman's model, the optician sold them to me with the sunglasses attachment (which I now find inconvenient). I think "Colette" was inspired by the name of the French novelist, and I would be honored to find out that all the writers in the early 1900’s wore similar glasses! These glasses were the only ones in the store that I liked, one out of a few thousand other models. Had I found the glasses that fit, and when I say "fit" I mean emotionally, intellectually, physically and metaphysically? When I wear them, do I adopt their personality, as I would wearing a mask? Let me open a parenthesis on the subject of masks to clarify.

Quite a few years ago, I took a mask workshop: not a mask-making, but a mask-wearing workshop. What happened there altered every participant's perception of his or her world. Some left in tears, not knowing who they were any more. A good source of cash for psychoanalysts, would you say, to undo the effect of mask workshops, but I would say from experience that to be interrogated for eight hours in a court deposition is much more damaging to your ego. In the mask workshop, at least, you choose a mask that you like. An assistant holds a mirror for you as you put the mask on and adapt the bottom half of your face to the mask (the mask covers the upper half of your face, in the Commedia dell'Arte style). Then you let the mask lead you, transformed and possessed. If you feel that you are becoming yourself again, your assistant shows you the mirror and you can see that you are the mask. The mask had made a clown of me and I have no idea how foolish I was.

This very powerful exercise demonstrates how what we wear can define how we behave, and I think the Colette glasses are the ones that correspond to my personality the most. In this case, they not only transfer their qualities to me, I am in symbiosis with them. I can make happy and sad faces, be utterly serious, and lower the glasses to look above them into someone’s eyes when I want to really know what to believe.

Having passed the time threshold of farsightedness, I recently went to get new glasses with the latest lenses to compensate for my new handicap. When I asked if they had glasses similar to those I was wearing, the clerk said no, unless I would look in the children's section. "Ah, Harry Potter," I observed, obtaining a blank stare in return to my dreamy hope that someone would make Harry Potter glasses for his fans with larger faces. She suggested another model "that fit my face better," and as she could have been my daughter, I took her advice blindly for a compliment and purchased the embellishment right away. However, if the new glasses made a more acceptable face to a twenty something I now realize they are not me. They would be perfect if I could blend perfectly in this world, if I wore the clothes they offer this season in the stores, if I went with the in-crowd, but I don't. I want to be me, and the round dark wireframe glasses are calling me back to who I really am.

Not that these glasses belong in cotton balls or a luxury leather case: they need to be practical. It is not unusual to sit on your glasses especially when they blend well with the motif on the bedspread. My glasses have had one screw replaced and several alignment operations performed on them: together we have a history. Why did I invest in a new pair when I liked these so much? Something tells me that replacing the lenses would be a simple option at the store, but of course why would you not want to spend a few more dollars for new frames? I suspect that we are back to the question of personality, and if you adopt this style of glasses, you and your glasses will not want to separate. Marketing did succeed, temporarily I hope, in remodeling my ego. But I diverge, and I should spare you the details of my underground resistance movement against the powers of Marketing.

My glasses are one of the artifacts that make me who I am. They are useful, if not essential, to me. But when at night I take them off and continue to read a book three inches from my left eye, I wished I could show grandma how being so close to a book is just pure ecstasy.