There is the idea that reading and writing, when committed to as something more than a hobby, will be repaid with a wearing down of the eyes. Like tires, thinned on lengths of tarmac. It isn’t really important how much truth there is to this. The idea has a more mythic, or religious, distinction, and the degree of visual decline reflects, somehow, the martyrdom of the writer. On a more mundane level, it leads to the need for glasses. I realised I would need them when I was twenty-one in a library café, and couldn’t see anything clearly beyond my own table. The large, white room, which until then had seemed perfectly visible, shuttered around me, as if a shower curtain had gradually lowered over my head. The reward for rolling my eyes over small words, coarsening one type of sight for the sake of another.
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