One of the only college subjects I had an aptitude for was philosophy.

Then again, I had a wonderful teacher, Reverend George Easter. Aside from being brilliant, he loved the subject, loved teaching and communicated both to his students.

That said, my two semesters with him were hardly easy rides. Slogging through the likes of Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, Bertrand Russell, et. al. took hours of note taking, reading, more note taking and more reading, and probably left lifelong damage on my psyche and soul.

One of the fun parts of the course was questioning and sometimes arguing with Rev. Easter on philosophic fine points like Aquinas’s Teleology or Pascal’s Wager. It was always fun because he was never mean in his rebuttals and explained the points perfectly and — of course — always won the arguments, as befits the guy who owns the classroom. Plus I always learned from them.

One day we were going over a unit on epistemology, the study of how we know what we know, and I got into it with him when he brought up the dubiousness of scientific measurement.

“What’s the big deal?” I said. “Obviously, you’ve got precise instruments to measure that stuff.”

“Oh?” he said. “And how do you know the instruments are measuring what they’re supposed to?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” I said.

“Well,” he said, “people thought up, made, and are observing the process, verifying all the data, right?”

He’d made quote marks with his fingers when he’d said “verifying.”

“Sure,” I said.

“And how precise, how objective is human observation?”

Back then, worldly 20-year-old that I was, while I thought just about everyone else didn’t know up from down, I knew my thought processes were perfect. But of late I started to have my doubts about how I see the world. Or more exactly, how I see it through my bifocals.

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Sights to behold

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It started one day in my office in Nori’s. I took a break from writing and looked out at the activity in the Grand Union parking lot. And when I did, I noticed everything was slightly blurry. Then I took off my glasses, and — Holy Moly!– everything was clearer. I repeated the process, and had the same results. I could see the distance better without my glasses than with them.

Next, I tried it with the reading part of the lenses. With my glasses on, looking at the book in front of me, I could see the print perfectly with both eyes. But when I closed my left eye (my good eye), the print was blurred.

Beyond that, if I looked in the mid-distance, say 40-50 feet away, with or without my glasses, everything looked like an impressionist painting.

Now here’s the thing: Aside from when I read, I almost never wear my glasses. My eyesight is good without glasses — between 20-30 and 20-40, to be exact. I can pass the DMV eye test no sweat, and only want glasses for night driving, when they make objects clearer, which they always did. But was that still true?

Easy enough to find out. All I had to do was drive around that night, which I did. And — lo and behold — without my glasses, the scenery was blurry, but with them, everything was in perfect focus.

What the hey was going one?

I assumed my prescription had changed, but there was only one way to find out: A visit to my second-favorite town and to my favorite optometrist, The Rajah of Refraction, Dr. Gregory Gachowski. Since he’d done my last exam, back in the fall as I recalled, he’d be privy to any changes that may or may not have taken place. As it turned out, the changes that had taken place weren’t with my eyesight, itself, but with my perceptions of it.

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Back to school

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There had been some changes in my vision, but they were so slight, a prescription change wouldn’t make any difference. And why were there changes? The Good Doctor said I have a tiny cataract (which I knew) and some tiny change with my macula (which I didn’t know), and maybe one or the other of them, or their combination, caused that change. They were, he said, things to monitor, but not to worry about at this point. Oh yeah, and best of all, he explained the structure of my macula using an M&M peanut as an analogy. So now, if I know nothing else about my eyes, I know they have a chocolate center.

Anyhow, we finally got to the nitty-gritty of my visit.

First, why could I see better without my glasses in the day at a distance, but better with them at night?

Second, why if my reading prescription was righteous, why when I read with both eyes, the print was perfect, but with my left eye closed it was not?

And finally, why couldn’t I see the mid-distance well, with or without glasses?

While I can’t remember his exact words, I think I have the basic explanations. So here goes.

I see better in the distance during the day without my glasses because of something called “The Pinhole Effect.” In short, it’s like with a camera: The smaller the aperture, the better the detail in a photo. Light is of course necessary to see, but too much light throws a spanner in the works. See, my glasses actually increase light and magnification too much. Remember, my eyesight is actually good without my glasses, so adding all the extra light and magnification distorts rather than clarifies.

Then at night, with less light, the glasses increase what’s there and make the detail become clearer. So much for My First Query.

Next, the paradox of reading with both eyes vs. reading with only my right one. Eyes work in tandem, so essentially my stronger eye compensates for my right one, in that when I read with both eyes, I see fine. When I read with only my right eye I’m looking through the weaker eye, all by its lonesome, and thus worse than if I look through my strong eye, or both eyes.

And winding it up, why can’t I see very well in the mid-distance, glasses or not? Simple: I’m old. Yep, sad but true. So essentially, that mid-range distance is kaput and the only way to correct it is to have specific lenses for that distance — trifocals, in other words.

And then it hit me: There was nothing wrong with my vision. My problem was in my perception of it. I’d assumed that my glasses would make me see everything perfectly, large and small, far away and up close, and anywhere in between. But of course that’s impossible. It’s why we have telescopes and magnifying glasses: They’re set to make things clearer at specific distances. In short, there’s no such thing as an all-purpose lens, any more than there’s an all-purpose tool or boot or anything.

So ultimately, my issue wasn’t perception, but projection: In reality, I was seeing fine, both with and without my glasses in those various situations. My problem was I thought I wasn’t.

All of which takes me back to philosophy class, specifically, epistemology and how do we know what we know. Which, I’ve concluded on both counts, is not very often and not very well, either.