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320 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1994
I liked holding one of them in an aqueous bread on the tip of my finger and admiring it's Saarinenesque upcurve, and when I fold it in half and rub its surface against itself to break up the protein deposits, I often remembered the satisfaction of making almost a Teflon fry pans. But though as a hobby they were rewarding, though I was as excited in opening the centrifugal spin cleaning machine I ordered for them as I would have been if I had bought an automatic bread Baker or a new kind of sexual utensil, they interfered with my appreciation of the world. I could see things to them, but I was not pleased to look at things. The bandwidth of my optical processors was being flooded with "there is an intruder on your eyeball" messages, so that a lot was simply not able to get through... At first, I thought it was worth losing the beauty of the world in order to look better to the world. I really was more handsome without glasses... The deciding moment really came when I spent the night with a woman who I think had sex with me sooner than she wanted to simply to distract me from noticing the fact that her contacts were bothering her. She hurried to the sex because the extreme intimacy, to her way of thinking, of appearing before me in her glasses was only possible after the last extreme intimacy of fucking me... I recognized The crucial importance of hinges to my pleasure in life. When I open my glasses in the morning before taking a shower and going to work, I am like an excited tourist who has risen from a hotel bed on the first day of a vacation: I have blown open a set of double French doors leading out onto a sunlit balcony with a view of the entire whatever- shipping corridor, bay, valley, parking lot. (How can people not like views over motel parking lots in the early morning? The new subtler car colors, the blue greens and warmer greys, and the sense that all those individuals are leveled in the democracy of sleep... make for one of the more inspiring visions that life can offer before nine o'clock.)
I do not think that loneliness is necessarily a bad condition. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people's lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with a passing, dampens irony and cynicism.