Dunaway, an author and professor of English, speculates on how some artists’ styles evolved because of their sight. The haziness of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings, he writes, “probably resulted from cataracts. For Turner, visual limitation became visual transcendence.” Paul Cézanne, who was myopic, “disdained help from lenses: ‘Take those vulgar things away,’ he reportedly said.” Dunaway discusses his own near-sightedness and how it affected him growing up: “The fact that my sight was weak left me with the feeling that I was not right, or whole—a visual loser.” The author’s own experience has him wondering about the origins of glasses. He writes about Roger Bacon, the 13th-century Oxford scholar “imprisoned for inventing glasses (or trying to).” The “first published mention of spectacles,” he notes, dates to a Venetian document, from 1300, that refers to “discs for the eye.” Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing (1942), Dunaway tries living a week without them, keeping readers posted on his progress: “It oddly resembled a drug trip….colors pulsed madly; walls undulated.” Dunaway touches on various conditions, including myopia, noting that the number of people needing glasses keeps going up. He delves into the longtime stigma to wearing glasses. One of the lines he heard as a kid—“a personal favorite”—was, “You reading that book or smelling it?” He devotes a chapter to fashion and, writing about literature and film, argues that “glasses in films have historically indicated a character’s disability or inadequacy.” Dunaway eventually gets cataract surgery. “Awaiting renewed vision, I am deeply grateful,” he writes. “For the entire optical industry, and of course, for friends and family who put up with me endlessly saying, ‘Would you move that a little closer?’ ‘What does that say?’ or ‘I’m sorry; I can’t see that.’”
