When I was younger I was often the first among friends to be able to read the name of the oncoming bus as it wove in and out of traffic in the distance. Now I have coke bottle glasses for reading and design work, and other glasses for driving and distances.
Fair enough. I’m lucky to have survived the nuclear threat of the cold war, to get old enough to complain about my eyesight.
But my degradation is unequal. My left eye already needs a new prescription while my right eye is generally okay.
As I understand it the brain is crosswired so that the dominant right hand is hooked up with the logical and linguistic left side of the brain. We associate the left side and the brain’s right hemisphere with the creative, intuitive side.
After the first Gulf War I remember seeing a US Air Force General being interviewed about the conflict. He had an amazing face. If you held up a sheet of paper across the television screen to cover one side of his face or the other, it seemed he actually had two faces. The right side was composed, interested, confident. The left side looked horrified, his left eye widened as if in horror, the corner of his mouth twisted down in a grim frown, all the muscles registering a completely different message from the right side.
Are we divided in ourselves? Is my left eye choosing to see less of the world because it understands more? I never thought it would happen to me.