glasses essay

Poems & Poets

The Glass Essay

I I can hear little clicks inside my dream. Night drips its silver tap down the back. At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking of the man who left in September. His name was Law. My face in the bathroom mirror has white streaks down it. I rinse the face and return to bed. Tomorrow I am going to visit my mother. SHE She lives on a moor in the north. She lives alone. Spring opens like a blade there. I travel all day on trains and bring a lot of books— some for my mother, some for me including The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë . This is my favourite author. Also my main fear, which I mean to confront. Whenever I visit my mother I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, my lonely life around me like a moor, my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation that dies when I come in the kitchen door. What meat is it, Emily, we need? THREE Three silent women at the kitchen table. My mother’s kitchen is dark and small but out the window there is the moor, paralyzed with ice. It extends as far as the eye can see over flat miles to a solid unlit white sky. Mother and I are chewing lettuce carefully. The kitchen wall clock emits a ragged low buzz that jumps once a minute over the twelve. I have Emily p. 216 propped open on the sugarbowl but am covertly watching my mother. A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside. My mother is studying her lettuce. I turn to p. 217. “In my flight through the kitchen I knocked over Hareton who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chairback in the doorway. . . .” It is as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass. Now and then a remark trails through the glass. Taxes on the back lot. Not a good melon, too early for melons. Hairdresser in town found God, closes shop every Tuesday. Mice in the teatowel drawer again. Little pellets. Chew off the corners of the napkins, if they knew what paper napkins cost nowadays. Rain tonight. Rain tomorrow. That volcano in the Philippines at it again. What’s her name Anderson died no not Shirley the opera singer. Negress. Cancer. Not eating your garnish, you don’t like pimento? Out the window I can see dead leaves ticking over the flatland and dregs of snow scarred by pine filth. At the middle of the moor where the ground goes down into a depression, the ice has begun to unclench. Black open water comes curdling up like anger. My mother speaks suddenly. That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it? You aren’t getting over him. My mother has a way of summing things up. She never liked Law much but she liked the idea of me having a man and getting on with life. Well he’s a taker and you’re a giver I hope it works out, was all she said after she met him. Give and take were just words to me at the time. I had not been in love before. It was like a wheel rolling downhill. But early this morning while mother slept and I was downstairs reading the part in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff clings at the lattice in the storm sobbing Come in! Come in! to the ghost of his heart’s darling, I fell on my knees on the rug and sobbed too. She knows how to hang puppies, that Emily. It isn’t like taking an aspirin you know, I answer feebly. Dr. Haw says grief is a long process. She frowns. What does it accomplish all that raking up the past? Oh—I spread my hands— I prevail! I look her in the eye. She grins. Yes you do. WHACHER Whacher, Emily’s habitual spelling of this word, has caused confusion. For example in the first line of the poem printed Tell me, whether, is it winter ? in the Shakespeare Head edition. But whacher is what she wrote. Whacher is what she was. She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night. She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather. She whached the bars of time, which broke. She whached the poor core of the world, wide open. To be a whacher is not a choice. There is nowhere to get away from it, no ledge to climb up to—like a swimmer who walks out of the water at sunset shaking the drops off, it just flies open. To be a whacher is not in itself sad or happy, although she uses these words in her verse as she uses the emotions of sexual union in her novel, grazing with euphemism the work of whaching. But it has no name. It is transparent. Sometimes she calls it Thou. “Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,” records Charlotte in 1828. Unsociable even at home and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out, Emily made her awkward way across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers. This sad stunted life, says one. Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment and despair, says another. She could have been a great navigator if she’d been male, suggests a third. Meanwhile Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question, Why cast the world away. For someone hooked up to Thou, the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence. But in between the neighbour who recalls her coming in from a walk on the moors with her face “lit up by a divine light” and the sister who tells us Emily never made a friend in her life, is a space where the little raw soul slips through. It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel, out of sight. The little raw soul was caught by no one. She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary or a fear of death. She worked in total six months of her life (at a school in Halifax) and died on the sofa at home at 2 P.M. on a winter afternoon in her thirty-first year. She spent most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet, walking the moor or whaching. She says it gave her peace. “All tight and right in which condition it is to be hoped we shall all be this        day 4 years,” she wrote in her Diary Paper of 1837. Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls. “Why all the fuss?” asks one critic. “She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it? A reasonably satisfactory homelife, a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings? What was this cage, invisible to us, which she felt herself to be confined in?” Well there are many ways of being held prisoner, I am thinking as I stride over the moor. As a rule after lunch mother has a nap and I go out to walk. The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April carve into me with knives of light. Something inside it reminds me of childhood— it is the light of the stalled time after lunch when clocks tick and hearts shut and fathers leave to go back to work and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering something they never tell. You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down? She shifted to a question about airports. Crops of ice are changing to mud all around me as I push on across the moor warmed by drifts from the pale blue sun. On the edge of the moor our pines dip and coast in breezes from somewhere else. Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days. It is as if I could dip my hand down into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat a year ago in another country. I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape—here we go fast around the last corner up the hill to his house, shadows of limes and roses blowing in the car window and music spraying from the radio and him singing and touching my left hand to his lips. Law lived in a high blue room from which he could see the sea. Time in its transparent loops as it passes beneath me now still carries the sound of the telephone in that room and traffic far off and doves under the window chuckling coolly and his voice saying, You beauty. I can feel that beauty’s heart beating inside mine as she presses into his arms in the high blue room— No, I say aloud. I force my arms down through air which is suddenly cold and heavy as water and the videotape jerks to a halt like a glass slide under a drop of blood. I stop and turn and stand into the wind, which now plunges towards me over the moor. When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die. This is not uncommon. I took up the practice of meditation. Each morning I sat on the floor in front of my sofa and chanted bits of old Latin prayers. De profundis clamavi ad te Domine . Each morning a vision came to me. Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul. I called them Nudes. Nude #1. Woman alone on a hill. She stands into the wind. It is a hard wind slanting from the north. Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift and blow away on the wind, leaving an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle calling mutely through lipless mouth. It pains me to record this, I am not a melodramatic person. But soul is “hewn in a wild workshop” as Charlotte Brontë says of Wuthering Heights . Charlotte’s preface to Wuthering Heights is a publicist’s masterpiece. Like someone carefully not looking at a scorpion crouched on the arm of the sofa Charlotte talks firmly and calmly about the other furniture of Emily’s workshop—about the inexorable spirit (“stronger than a man, simpler than a child”), the cruel illness (“pain no words can render”), the autonomous end (“she sank rapidly, she made haste to leave us”) and about Emily’s total subjection to a creative project she could neither understand nor control, and for which she deserves no more praise nor blame than if she had opened her mouth “to breathe lightning.” The scorpion is inching down the arm of the sofa while Charlotte continues to speak helpfully about lightning and other weather we may expect to experience when we enter Emily’s electrical atmosphere. It is “a horror of great darkness” that awaits us there but Emily is not responsible. Emily was in the grip. “Having formed these beings she did not know what she had done,” says Charlotte (of Heathcliff and Earnshaw and Catherine). Well there are many ways of being held prisoner. The scorpion takes a light spring and lands on our left knee as Charlotte concludes, “On herself she had no pity.” Pitiless too are the Heights, which Emily called Wuthering because of their “bracing ventilation” and “a north wind over the edge.” Whaching a north wind grind the moor that surrounded her father’s house on every side, formed of a kind of rock called millstone grit, taught Emily all she knew about love and its necessities— an angry education that shapes the way her characters use one another. “My love for Heathcliff,” says Catherine, “resembles the eternal rocks beneath a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” Necessary? I notice the sun has dimmed and the afternoon air sharpening. I turn and start to recross the moor towards home. What are the imperatives that hold people like Catherine and Heathcliff together and apart, like pores blown into hot rock and then stranded out of reach of one another when it hardens? What kind of necessity is that? The last time I saw Law was a black night in September. Autumn had begun, my knees were cold inside my clothes. A chill fragment of moon rose. He stood in my living room and spoke without looking at me. Not enough spin on it, he said of our five years of love. Inside my chest I felt my heart snap into two pieces which floated apart. By now I was so cold it was like burning. I put out my hand to touch his. He moved back. I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy. But now he was looking at me. Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes. Everything gets crazy. When nude I turned my back because he likes the back. He moved onto me. Everything I know about love and its necessities I learned in that one moment when I found myself thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherished me. There was no area of my mind not appalled by this action, no part of my body that could have done otherwise. But to talk of mind and body begs the question. Soul is the place, stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, where such necessity grinds itself out. Soul is what I kept watch on all that night. Law stayed with me. We lay on top of the covers as if it weren’t really a night of sleep and time, caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language like the children we used to be. That was a night that centred Heaven and Hell, as Emily would say. We tried to fuck but he remained limp, although happy. I came again and again, each time accumulating lucidity, until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down on the two souls clasped there on the bed with their mortal boundaries visible around them like lines on a map. I saw the lines harden. He left in the morning. It is very cold walking into the long scraped April wind. At this time of year there is no sunset just some movements inside the light and then a sinking away. KITCHEN Kitchen is quiet as a bone when I come in. No sound from the rest of the house. I wait a moment then open the fridge. Brilliant as a spaceship it exhales cold confusion. My mother lives alone and eats little but her fridge is always crammed. After extracting the yogurt container from beneath a wily arrangement of leftover blocks of Christmas cake wrapped in foil and prescription medicine bottles I close the fridge door. Bluish dusk fills the room like a sea slid back. I lean against the sink. White foods taste best to me and I prefer to eat alone. I don’t know why. Once I heard girls singing a May Day song that went:                                  Violante in the pantry                                  Gnawing at a mutton bone                                  How she gnawed it                                  How she clawed it                                  When she felt herself alone. Girls are cruelest to themselves. Someone like Emily Brontë, who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman, had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow. We can see her ridding herself of it at various times with a gesture like she used to brush the carpet. Reason with him and then whip him! was her instruction (age six) to her father regarding brother Branwell. And when she was 14 and bitten by a rabid dog she strode (they say) into the kitchen and taking red hot tongs from the back of the stove applied them directly to her arm. Cauterization of Heathcliff took longer. More than thirty years in the time of the novel, from the April evening when he runs out the back door of the kitchen and vanishes over the moor because he overheard half a sentence of Catherine’s (“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff”) until the wild morning when the servant finds him stark dead and grinning on his rainsoaked bed upstairs in Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is a pain devil. If he had stayed in the kitchen long enough to hear the other half of Catherine’s sentence (“so he will never know how I love him”) Heathcliff would have been set free. But Emily knew how to catch a devil. She put into him in place of a soul the constant cold departure of Catherine from his nervous system every time he drew a breath or moved thought. She broke all his moments in half, with the kitchen door standing open. I am not unfamiliar with this half-life. But there is more to it than that. Heathcliff’s sexual despair arose out of no such experience in the life of Emily Brontë, so far as we know. Her question, which concerns the years of inner cruelty that can twist a person into a pain     devil, came to her in a kindly firelit kitchen (“kichin” in Emily’s spelling) where she and Charlotte and Anne peeled potatoes together and made up stories with the old house dog Keeper at their feet. There is a fragment of a poem she wrote in 1839 (about six years before Wuthering Heights ) that says:                             That iron man was born like me                             And he was once an ardent boy:                             He must have felt in infancy                             The glory of a summer sky. Who is the iron man? My mother’s voice cuts across me, from the next room where she is lying on the sofa. Is that you dear? Yes Ma. Why don’t you turn on a light in there? Out the kitchen window I watch the steely April sun jab its last cold yellow streaks across a dirty silver sky. Okay Ma. What’s for supper? LIBERTY Liberty means different things to different people. I have never liked lying in bed in the morning. Law did. My mother does. But as soon as the morning light hits my eyes I want to be out in it— moving along the moor into the first blue currents and cold navigation of everything awake. I hear my mother in the next room turn and sigh and sink deeper. I peel the stale cage of sheets off my legs and I am free. Out on the moor all is brilliant and hard after a night of frost. The light plunges straight up from the ice to a blue hole at the top of the sky. Frozen mud crunches underfoot. The sound startles me back into the dream I was having this morning when I awoke, one of those nightlong sweet dreams of lying in Law’s arms like a needle in water—it is a physical effort to pull myself out of his white silk hands as they slide down my dream hips—I turn and face into the wind and begin to run. Goblins, devils and death stream behind me. In the days and months after Law left I felt as if the sky was torn off my life. I had no home in goodness anymore. To see the love between Law and me turn into two animals gnawing and craving through one another towards some other hunger was terrible. Perhaps this is what people mean by original sin, I thought. But what love could be prior to it? What is prior? What is love? My questions were not original. Nor did I answer them. Mornings when I meditated I was presented with a nude glimpse of my lone soul, not the complex mysteries of love and hate. But the Nudes are still as clear in my mind as pieces of laundry that froze on the clothesline overnight. There were in all thirteen of them. Nude #2. Woman caught in a cage of thorns. Big glistening brown thorns with black stains on them where she twists this way and that way unable to stand upright. Nude #3. Woman with a single great thorn implanted in her forehead. She grips it in both hands endeavouring to wrench it out. Nude #4. Woman on a blasted landscape backlit in red like Hieronymus Bosch. Covering her head and upper body is a hellish contraption like the top half of a crab. With arms crossed as if pulling off a sweater she works hard at dislodging the crab. It was about this time I began telling Dr. Haw about the Nudes. She said, When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them? Why keep watching? Why not go away? I was amazed. Go away where? I said. This still seems to me a good question. But by now the day is wide open and a strange young April light is filling the moor with gold milk. I have reached the middle where the ground goes down into a depression and fills with swampy water. It is frozen. A solid black pane of moor life caught in its own night attitudes. Certain wild gold arrangements of weed are visible deep in the black. Four naked alder trunks rise straight up from it and sway in the blue air. Each trunk where it enters the ice radiates a map of silver pressures— thousands of hair-thin cracks catching the white of the light like a jailed face catching grins through the bars. Emily Brontë has a poem about a woman in jail who says                 A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me                 And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty. I wonder what kind of Liberty this is. Her critics and commentators say she means death or a visionary experience that prefigures death. They understand her prison as the limitations placed on a clergyman’s daughter by nineteenth-century life in a remote parish on a cold moor in the north of England. They grow impatient with the extreme terms in which she figures prison life. “In so much of Brontë’s work the self-dramatising and posturing of these poems teeters on the brink of a potentially bathetic melodrama,” says one. Another refers to “the cardboard sublime” of her caught world. I stopped telling my psychotherapist about the Nudes when I realized I had no way to answer her question, Why keep watching? Some people watch, that’s all I can say. There is nowhere else to go, no ledge to climb up to. Perhaps I can explain this to her if I wait for the right moment, as with a very difficult sister. “On that mind time and experience alone could work: to the influence of other intellects it was not amenable,” wrote Charlotte of Emily. I wonder what kind of conversation these two had over breakfast at the parsonage. “My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character,” Charlotte emphasizes, “nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed. . . .” Recesses were many. One autumn day in 1845 Charlotte “accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily’s        handwriting.” It was a small (4 x 6) notebook with a dark red cover marked 6d. and contained 44 poems in Emily’s minute hand. Charlotte had known Emily wrote verse but felt “more than surprise” at its quality. “Not at all like the poetry women generally write.” Further surprise awaited Charlotte when she read Emily’s novel, not least for its foul language. She gently probes this recess in her Editor’s Preface to Wuthering Heights . “A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter     only—a blank line filling the interval.” Well, there are different definitions of Liberty. Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying. I took this to be more a wish than a thought and changed the subject. But blank lines do not say nothing. As Charlotte puts it, “The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling it spares— what horror it conceals.” I turn my steps and begin walking back over the moor towards home and breakfast. It is a two-way traffic, the language of the unsaid. My favourite pages of The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë are the notes at the back recording small adjustments made by Charlotte to the text of Emily’s verse, which Charlotte edited for publication after Emily’s death. “ Prison for strongest [in Emily’s hand] altered to lordly by Charlotte.” HERO I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast whether she had a good night and is about to say a happy thing or not. Not. She puts her toast down on the side of her plate. You know you can pull the drapes in that room, she begins. This is a coded reference to one of our oldest arguments, from what I call The Rules Of Life series. My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night. I open mine as wide as possible. I like to see everything, I say. What’s there to see? Moon. Air. Sunrise. All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up. I like to wake up. At this point the drapes argument has reached a delta and may advance along one of three channels. There is the What You Need Is A Good Night’s Sleep channel, the Stubborn As Your Father channel and random channel. More toast? I interpose strongly, pushing back my chair. Those women! says my mother with an exasperated rasp. Mother has chosen random channel. Women? Complaining about rape all the time I see she is tapping one furious finger on yesterday’s newspaper lying beside the grape jam. The front page has a small feature about a rally for International Women’s Day— have you had a look at the Sears Summer Catalogue? Nope. Why, it’s a disgrace! Those bathing suits— cut way up to here! (she points) No wonder! You’re saying women deserve to get raped because Sears bathing suit ads have high-cut legs? Ma, are you serious? Well someone has to be responsible. Why should women be responsible for male desire? My voice is high. Oh I see you’re one of Them. One of Whom? My voice is very high. Mother vaults it. And whatever did you do with that little tank suit you had last year the green     one? It looked so smart on you. The frail fact drops on me from a great height that my mother is afraid. She will be eighty years old this summer. Her tiny sharp shoulders hunched in the blue bathrobe make me think of Emily Brontë’s little merlin hawk Hero that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table when Charlotte wasn‘t around. So Ma, we’ll go—I pop up the toaster and toss a hot slice of pumpernickel lightly across onto her plate— visit Dad today? She eyes the kitchen clock with hostility. Leave at eleven, home again by four? I continue. She is buttering her toast with jagged strokes. Silence is assent in our code. I go into the next room to phone the taxi. My father lives in a hospital for patients who need chronic care about 50 miles from here. He suffers from a kind of dementia characterized by two sorts of pathological change first recorded in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer. First, the presence in cerebral tissue of a spherical formation known as neuritic plaque, consisting mainly of degenerating brain cells. Second, neurofibrillary snarlings in the cerebral cortex and in the hippocampus. There is no known cause or cure. Mother visits him by taxi once a week for the last five years. Marriage is for better or for worse, she says, this is the worse. So about an hour later we are in the taxi shooting along empty country roads towards town. The April light is clear as an alarm. As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object existing in space on its own shadow. I wish I could carry this clarity with me into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce. I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy. These are my two wishes. It is hard to find the beginning of dementia. I remember a night about ten years ago when I was talking to him on the telephone. It was a Sunday night in winter. I heard his sentences filling up with fear. He would start a sentence—about weather, lose his way, start another. It made me furious to hear him floundering— my tall proud father, former World War II navigator! It made me merciless. I stood on the edge of the conversation, watching him thrash about for cues, offering none, and it came to me like a slow avalanche that he had no idea who he was talking to. Much colder today I guess. . . . his voice pressed into the silence and broke off, snow falling on it. There was a long pause while snow covered us both. Well I won’t keep you, he said with sudden desperate cheer as if sighting land. I’ll say goodnight now, I won’t run up your bill. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Who are you? I said into the dial tone. At the hospital we pass down long pink halls through a door with a big window and a combination lock (5—25—3) to the west wing, for chronic care patients. Each wing has a name. The chronic wing is Our Golden Mile although mother prefers to call it The Last Lap. Father sits strapped in a chair which is tied to the wall in a room of other tied people tilting at various angles. My father tilts least, I am proud of him. Hi Dad how y’doing? His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air. My mother lays her hand on his. Hello love, she says. He jerks his hand away. We sit. Sunlight flocks through the room. Mother begins to unpack from her handbag the things she has brought for him, grapes, arrowroot biscuits, humbugs. He is addressing strenuous remarks to someone in the air between us. He uses a language known only to himself, made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals. Once in a while some old formula floats up through the wash— You don’t say! or Happy birthday to you!— but no real sentence for more than three years now. I notice his front teeth are getting black. I wonder how you clean the teeth of mad people. He always took good care of his teeth. My mother looks up. She and I often think two halves of one thought. Do you remember that gold-plated toothpick you sent him from Harrod’s the summer you were in London? she asks. Yes I wonder what happened to it. Must be in the bathroom somewhere. She is giving him grapes one by one. They keep rolling out of his huge stiff fingers. He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong, but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone house— except the hands. The hands keep growing. Each one now as big as a boot in Van Gogh, they go lumbering after the grapes in his lap. But now he turns to me with a rush of urgent syllables that break off on a high note—he waits, staring into my face. That quizzical look. One eyebrow at an angle. I have a photograph taped to my fridge at home. It shows his World War II air crew posing in front of the plane. Hands firmly behind backs, legs wide apart, chins forward. Dressed in the puffed flying suits with a wide leather strap pulled tight through the crotch. They squint into the brilliant winter sun of 1942. It is dawn. They are leaving Dover for France. My father on the far left is the tallest airman, with his collar up, one eyebrow at an angle. The shadowless light makes him look immortal, for all the world like someone who will not weep again. He is still staring into my face. Flaps down! I cry. His black grin flares once and goes out like a match. HOT Hot blue moonlight down the steep sky. I wake too fast from a cellar of hanged puppies with my eyes pouring into the dark. Fumbling and slowly consciousness replaces the bars. Dreamtails and angry liquids swim back down to the middle of me. It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now. This is not uncommon after loss of love— blue and black and red blasting the crater open. I am interested in anger. I clamber along to find the source. My dream was of an old woman lying awake in bed. She controls the house by a system of light bulbs strung above her on wires. Each wire has a little black switch. One by one the switches refuse to turn the bulbs on. She keeps switching and switching in rising tides of very hot anger. Then she creeps out of bed to peer through lattices at the rooms of the rest of the house. The rooms are silent and brilliantly lit and full of huge furniture beneath which crouch small creatures—not quite cats not quite rats licking their narrow red jaws under a load of time. I want to be beautiful again, she whispers but the great overlit rooms tick emptily as a deserted oceanliner and now behind her in the dark a rustling sound, comes— My pajamas are soaked. Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart, pouring up the vents. Every night I wake to this anger, the soaked bed, the hot pain box slamming me each way I move. I want justice. Slam. I want an explanation. Slam. I want to curse the false friend who said I love you forever. Slam. I reach up and switch on the bedside lamp. Night springs out the window and is gone over the moor. I lie listening to the light vibrate in my ears and thinking about curses. Emily Brontë was good at cursing. Falsity and bad love and the deadly pain of alteration are constant topics in     her verse.                      Well, thou halt paid me back my love!                      But if there be a God above                      Whose arm is strong, whose word is true,                      This hell shall wring thy spirit too! The curses are elaborate:             There go, Deceiver, go! My hand is streaming wet;             My heart’s blood flows to buy the blessing—To forget!             Oh could that lost heart give back, back again to thine,             One tenth part of the pain that clouds my dark decline! But they do not bring her peace:        Vain words, vain frenzied thoughts! No ear can hear me call—        Lost in the vacant air my frantic curses fall. . . .        Unconquered in my soul the Tyrant rules me still—        Life bows to my control, but Love I cannot kill! Her anger is a puzzle. It raises many questions in me, to see love treated with such cold and knowing contempt by someone who rarely left home “except to go to church or take a walk on the hills” (Charlotte tells us) and who had no more intercourse with Haworth folk than “a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates.” How did Emily come to lose faith in humans? She admired their dialects, studied their genealogies, “but with them she rarely exchanged a word.” Her introvert nature shrank from shaking hands with someone she met on the moor. What did Emily know of lover’s lies or cursive human faith? Among her biographers is one who conjectures she bore or aborted a child during her six-month stay in Halifax, but there is no evidence at all for such an event and the more general consensus is that Emily did not touch a man in her 31     years. Banal sexism aside, I find myself tempted to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge for all that life withheld from Emily. But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation. As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women. It is a chilly thought.                                                           The heart is dead since infancy.                               Unwept for let the body go. Suddenly cold I reach down and pull the blanket back up to my chin. The vocation of anger is not mine. I know my source. It is stunning, it is a moment like no other, when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore. I switch off the lamp and lie on my back, thinking about Emily’s cold young soul. Where does unbelief begin? When I was young there were degrees of certainty. I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands. Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands occasionally        disappear— From the next room I hear my mother shift and sigh and settle back down under the doorsill of sleep. Out the window the moon is just a cold bit of silver gristle low on fading banks     of sky.           Our guests are darkly lodged, I whispered, gazing through           The vault . . . THOU The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness. And I prefer to put it off. It is morning. Astonished light is washing over the moor from north to east. I am walking into the light. One way to put off loneliness is to interpose God. Emily had a relationship on this level with someone she calls Thou. She describes Thou as awake like herself all night and full of strange power. Thou woos Emily with a voice that comes out of the night wind. Thou and Emily influence one another in the darkness, playing near and far at once. She talks about a sweetness that “proved us one.” I am uneasy with the compensatory model of female religious experience and yet, there is no question, it would be sweet to have a friend to tell things to at night, without the terrible sex price to pay. This is a childish idea, I know. My education, I have to admit, has been gappy. The basic rules of male-female relations were imparted atmospherically in our family, no direct speech allowed. I remember one Sunday I was sitting in the backseat of the car. Father in front. We were waiting in the driveway for mother, who came around the corner of the house and got into the passenger side of the car dressed in a yellow Chanel suit and black high heels. Father glanced sideways at her. Showing a good bit of leg today Mother, he said in a voice which I (age eleven) thought odd. I stared at the back of her head waiting for what she would say. Her answer would clear this up. But she just laughed a strange laugh with ropes all over it. Later that summer I put this laugh together with another laugh I overheard as I was going upstairs. She was talking on the telephone in the kitchen. Well a woman would be just as happy with a kiss on the cheek most of the time but YOU KNOW MEN, she was saying. Laugh. Not ropes, thorns. I have arrived at the middle of the moor where the ground goes down into a low swampy place. The swamp water is frozen solid. Bits of gold weed have etched themselves on the underside of the ice like messages.                         I’ll come when thou art saddest,                         Laid alone in the darkened room;                         When the mad day’s mirth has vanished,                         And the smile of joy is banished,                          I’ll come when the heart’s real feeling                          Has entire, unbiased sway,                          And my influence o’er thee stealing                          Grief deepening, joy congealing,                          Shall bear thy soul away.                          Listen! ’tis just the hour,                          The awful time for thee:                          Dost thou not feel upon thy soul                          A flood of strange sensations roll,                          Forerunners of a sterner power,                          Heralds of me? Very hard to read, the messages that pass between Thou and Emily. In this poem she reverses their roles, speaking not as the victim but to the victim. It is chilling to watch Thou move upon thou, who lies alone in the dark waiting to be mastered. It is a shock to realize that this low, slow collusion of master and victim within one voice is a rationale for the most awful loneliness of the poet’s hour. She has reversed the roles of thou and Thou not as a display of power but to force out of herself some pity for this soul trapped in glass, which is her true creation. Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am. Is it a vocation of anger? Why construe silence as the Real Presence? Why stoop to kiss this doorstep? Why be unstrung and pounded flat and pine away imagining someone vast to whom I may vent the swell of my soul? Emily was fond of Psalm 130. “My soul waiteth on Thou more than they that watch for the morning, I say more than they that watch for the morning.” I like to believe that for her the act of watching provided a shelter, that her collusion with Thou gave ease to anger and desire: "In Thou they are quenched as a fire of thorns,“ says the psalmist. But for myself I do not believe this, I am not quenched— with Thou or without Thou I find no shelter. I am my own Nude. And Nudes have a difficult sexual destiny. I have watched this destiny disclose itself in its jerky passage from girl to woman to who I am now, from love to anger to this cold marrow, from fire to shelter to fire. What is the opposite of believing in Thou— merely not believing in Thou? No. That is too simple. That is to prepare a misunderstanding. I want to speak more clearly. Perhaps the Nudes are the best way. Nude #5. Deck of cards. Each card is made of flesh. The living cards are days of a woman’s life. I see a great silver needle go flashing right through the deck once from end to     end. Nude #6 I cannot remember. Nude #7. White room whose walls, having neither planes nor curves nor angles, are composed of a continuous satiny white membrane like the flesh of some interior organ of the moon. It is a living surface, almost wet. Lucency breathes in and out. Rainbows shudder across it. And around the walls of the room a voice goes whispering, Be very careful. Be very careful . Nude #8. Black disc on which the fires of all the winds are attached in a row. A woman stands on the disc amid the winds whose long yellow silk flames flow and vibrate up through her. Nude #9. Transparent loam. Under the loam a woman has dug a long deep trench. Into the trench she is placing small white forms, I don’t know what they are. Nude #10. Green thorn of the world poking up alive through the heart of a woman who lies on her back on the ground. The thorn is exploding its green blood above her in the air. Everything it is it has , the voice says. Nude #11. Ledge in outer space. Space is bluish black and glossy as solid water and moving very fast in all directions, shrieking past the woman who stands pinned to nothing by its pressure. She peers and glances for some way to go, trying to lift her hand but cannot. Nude #12. Old pole in the wind. Cold currents are streaming over it and pulling out into ragged long horizontal black lines some shreds of ribbon attached to the pole. I cannot see how they are attached— notches? staples? nails? All of a sudden the wind changes and all the black shreds rise straight up in the air and tie themselves into knots, then untie and float down. The wind is gone. It waits. By this time, midway through winter, I had become entirely fascinated with my spiritual melodrama. Then it stopped. Days passed, months passed and I saw nothing. I continued to peer and glance, sitting on the rug in front of my sofa in the curtainless morning with my nerves open to the air like something skinned. I saw nothing. Outside the window spring storms came and went. April snow folded its huge white paws over doors and porches. I watched a chunk of it lean over the roof and break off and fall and I thought, How slow! as it glided soundlessly past, but still—nothing. No nudes. No Thou. A great icicle formed on the railing of my balcony so I drew up close to the window and tried peering through the icicle, hoping to trick myself into some interior vision, but all I saw was the man and woman in the room across the street making their bed and laughing. I stopped watching. I forgot about Nudes. I lived my life, which felt like a switched-off TV. Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it. “No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them,” wrote Charlotte the day after burying her sister. Emily had shaken free. A soul can do that. Whether it goes to join Thou and sit on the porch for all eternity enjoying jokes and kisses and beautiful cold spring evenings, you and I will never know. But I can tell you what I saw. Nude #13 arrived when I was not watching for it. It came at night. Very much like Nude #1. And yet utterly different. I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air. It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached, but as I came closer I saw it was a human body trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. And there was no pain. The wind was cleansing the bones. They stood forth silver and necessary. It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all. It walked out of the light.   Copyright Credit: Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay” from Glass, Irony, and God. Copyright © 1994 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Source: Glass Irony and God (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1995)

A Glass Essay

Reading anne carson post-breakup.

An interior view of the Radcliffe Camera at Oxford University, where the author spent a summer re-reading Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay." Getty Images / Lonely Planet

In the last week of june 2018 , I got unexpectedly dumped. During the month that followed, I did the only thing that felt right: I read Anne Carson’s long poem “The Glass Essay” every day. I had come to Oxford to teach a summer class as England endured a historic drought, and the sun shone heartlessly, beautifully every day. Every morning I woke up, ran around the park, rushed through a shower and a coffee, and ascended to the upper reading room of the Radcliffe Camera, one of Oxford’s extravagantly beautiful libraries. I would claim my favorite desk, with my favorite graffito (“LIBIDINAL COMMUNISM”) etched in its wood frame, and lean back in my chair, staring up into the rotunda’s scrolled dome. Then, once my mind was blank and still, usually around 9:25, I’d open Carson and begin. The poem starts:

I can hear little clicks inside my dream. Night drips its silver tap down the back. At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking

of the man who left in September. His name was Law.

From the first time I read them after the breakup, these lines laced me into the poem good and tight. “The Glass Essay” is a complex structure, holding two disparate elements together in a surprising balance: an intimate meditation on a romantic breakup, and a critical reading of the life of Emily Brontë. The poem immediately became the frame I required to shape the posture of my hours. I needed to read it to stay upright during the day and to stay lying down at night. I too know that slow, cold drip down the spine because I’m a bad sleeper; at 4 a.m. I’m always either going to bed or suddenly starting awake. But the main point of identification was so obvious I didn’t even bother to note it: I was going through a breakup, and “The Glass Essay” is indisputably the greatest breakup poem ever written. (Don’t try to argue with me on this.) The urge to reread flowed out of my desire to sink further into the poem and its speaker and remain there, a desire that in turn flowed out of the deeper, inane desire (Carson’s, my own) to sink further into the memory of the departed lover and remain there . On the cusp of dark and dawn, I would lie in my narrow bed and try to memorize the whole thirty-eight-page poem. I never got very far, but certain lines snagged in my mind. The moments that really cut were where the language is plainest, most painful: “His name was Law.”

The name of the man in Carson’s poem puzzled me every time I read it. I wondered, always, what I was supposed to take from this solemn pun. Was “Law” his real name? Is it a name at all, or is it a talisman, perhaps a command? I knew I could seek out answers or speculations from other readers, or perhaps even by emailing or speaking with the writer, as other scholars of contemporary literature might. But I didn’t then and still don’t want to. I prefer to stay alone with this poem.

And so I sank and took “The Glass Essay” down with me, not yet understanding that it had much more to teach me than the loss of love.

This yearning for a lost lover named Law raises a question: Is to be loveless to be lawless? If Law equals love, then is love—when requited, respected—the thing that keeps us in line, restrained and civil? Certainly, both loss and longing are states of emergency, outside the law. Perhaps to be with Law is to be governed by him, or by desire for him. Or is it the opposite? One brief moment in the poem seems like it might offer an answer, but then flatly refuses to:

Well, there are different definitions of Liberty. Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying. I took this to be more a wish than a thought

and changed the subject.

The man who fractured my heart that summer, and cleanly broke it later on, was also fond of speculating about love and freedom. For someone who talked and wrote a lot to friends and strangers, he didn’t put much stake in the verbal as a mode of emotional honesty. Looking back, I see now that he thought love was the freedom not to explain yourself, a millennial version of “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.” Love, to him, was something like a complete freedom of self-expression so expansive and natural it didn’t have to be contained in words but could instead be communicated purely through gaze, or touch, or atmospheric resonance. I believe in gazes and touches and atmospheres, but I cannot—and would never—forsake my belief in words. I am most free and real when jostling around restlessly in the human laboratory of dialogue.

But dialogue requires someone who will talk back: that is its fundamental rule. It is proof of the lawlessness of love that I could love him when we didn’t even agree that this rule existed.

his name was luck.

Luck because I met him at a time when I was stoutly resisting the temptation to declare myself terminally unlucky in love. I did not want to let myself off the hook like that, did not want to make lame cosmic excuses for my loneliness with abstractions like fate or doom. But then I met him, and knew that luck was real, because he just appeared one day, out of the ether of a dating app. We found that we craved the same foods, laughed at the same small things, liked the same smells and colors. It was plain good fortune to have met. In fact, it was the first major stroke of fortune I’d had since I’d gotten my teaching job, a fancy position at a prestigious university in which I had been flailing—unfit and unwell, rather than unlucky—for several years. And now here was Luck, another outwardly successful person who had his own share of doubts and regrets, and empathized with my feeling of unfitness and unease. We were both sad, lucky people who felt that our luck was unearned, a problem that is understandably very annoying to most. What luck to have found each other!

When Luck left me that June, I gave in to the mortifying feeling that I was loveless, outside the laws of normal life. The months in England were a mourning time, I told myself with false confidence. When I went home in the fall, it would be over—not better, just over . And so I sank and took “The Glass Essay” down with me, not yet understanding that it had much more to teach me than the loss of love.

for most of my life , the only thing I could call myself with any certainty was a reader. A reader of books and, I realized somewhat late, a reader of people. Many of us who were lonely children see ourselves this way. In elementary school I saved my quarters for slim Bantam paperbacks, read under the covers, and lived almost wholly in my imagination—the whole starter kit of clichés that compose the shy, bookish child.

I realized early that the idea of age appropriateness in books was a sham, and for years I read anything that captured my imagination. Even in college, I rarely did the assigned reading; instead, I wound my way through an idiosyncratic personal canon. I was always reading the wrong thing at the wrong time, it seemed—and often in the wrong place. (I got fired from a library job for getting caught reading a fantasy novel in a study carrel when I was supposed to be shelving books.) But these choices were right to me . Finding the right books to love felt as natural and unplanned as finding the right people to love.

In graduate school, though, there suddenly seemed to be consequences for reading indiscriminately. My reading, and my writing about reading, were often considered irresponsible, by which my professors and peers meant that they were undertheorized, uninformed, and unresearched. This was a brutal lesson that I came to appreciate. I developed parameters of thought and rigor that shaped how I read, learning to channel even the most randomly stumbled-upon texts into my dissertation’s overarching argument. And so, I became accustomed to (and even dependent upon) a kind of disciplined liberty. I accepted that while objectivity was impossible, subjectivity was perhaps avoidable. I became a professional reader.

That summer abroad, I hadn’t intended to read “The Glass Essay,” as I’d never considered myself a responsible reader of Anne Carson. Since I was not a classicist, and her work is suffused with Classical references and texts, I felt I would not have permission until I learned enough about the ancient poets to read her properly— and so, realistically, never. But a couplet from “The Glass Essay” I had seen quoted in a friend’s dissertation stuck in my mind:

When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die. This is not uncommon.

When Luck left me, these lines resurfaced. That’s it, I thought. That is love. The blank honesty of the couplet made me need Carson; I had to give in to her.

In Oxford, I was supposed to be writing the scholarly book I never ended up finishing; instead, I summoned up a short stack of Carson from the depths of the Bodleian. Slim books with great, epic names: Glass, Irony, and God ; Eros the Bittersweet ; Economy of the Unlost. I encountered “The Glass Essay” upon opening the first of these. For a few days it was just something I was muddling through, a poem I was still in the midst of deciphering. But by the end of that week I had read it and annotated it and read it again, and I still felt a need for it. I could not read anything else until I had satisfied that need. “The Glass Essay” stood in the way of any other text. That’s how it became part of my daily schedule: run, shower, coffee, read “The Glass Essay,” work. On the weekends, when the reading room was closed and LIBIDINAL COMMUNISM inaccessible, I’d change it up a little: read “The Glass Essay” upon waking, run, coffee, shower, work. As someone who thinks mostly about novels, I am shy around poetry; I feel often as though it is reading me more than I am reading it. After years of feeling that way, it was strange to wake up and read a poem every day, and to feel I had grown intimate with it , tender with its idiosyncrasies of form and rhythm. For four or five weeks this went on, the poem becoming as falsely natural as a piercing, a foreign body fitted snugly into the internal and external material of my life.

To make clear the strangeness of this, I must first admit to being a compulsive failed self-improver. My parents hope to attain eternal life through dietary restriction; trained from childhood to respect other people’s regimens, I’ve always admired those who can develop systems of personal organization and live consistently within them. Perhaps in reaction to the strictness of my childhood, I am not one of those people. At the beginning of every school year, I make detailed schedules for days of teaching, days of writing, days of reading, but after a week or two, everything falls apart, and the only plans I can follow are my lesson plans. I am addicted to working and thinking as the spirit moves me, in the maddening way that only the unattached, often depressive person can get away with: seventy-two-hour writing benders, followed by days or weeks of melancholic collapse; periods of mental slog punctuated by a sudden sprint through five or six books without breaks for food or movement. I recognize the decadence of this lifestyle. In the brief neutral moments between these altered states I find it extremely embarrassing and self-indulgent. Yet no matter how many rules I attempt to impose upon myself, the only predictable cycle I maintain is the endless loop of plans made, plans broken, self-flagellation.

So the Carson program came as a real surprise. The closest experience I’d had to it were the summer days, governed by animal schedules, that I’d spent working on farms on and off throughout my life. In fact, there was something reassuringly animal-like about the predetermined hours of that month, as though the poem were the morning scoop of grain I needed to ruminate on to give me enough energy to move through the day. The poem was necessary sustenance.

in staring at carson’s words day after day, I found myself doing something I’d been trained in graduate school not to do: I started to see myself reflected in them. I fell deeply and unquestioningly into identification with the speaker, seeking out similarities, imagining that we felt the same emotions and sensations. It was like falling in love.

The line “Mother and I are chewing lettuce carefully” brought back the diet-ruled dinners of my childhood, my parents and me silently chewing cold leaves and roots with grim concentration. The speaker doesn’t like to lie late in bed in the mornings, and neither do I. (Her: “Law did. / My mother does.” Me: Luck didn’t, either.) Soon I even felt a tug of fond familiarity reading about things that I don’t do or feel. Standing at the open refrigerator, the speaker says,

White foods taste best to me

and I prefer to eat alone. I don’t know why.

I don’t feel any particular way about white foods, and I prefer to eat in company. But rereading those lines, I was momentarily certain that I too felt as the speaker did and had to remind myself that this was not the case. These tiny, domestic sympathies, embedded in a poem that deals with the very biggest questions—What is love? What is God? What is art, who dares attempt it, and at what cost? What are mother and father and self?—folded me into the text with a bodily immediacy, rather than keeping me at the cool distance of scholarly reading.

Looking back, I wonder if cultivating intimacy with the text in this way was a self-soothing mechanism. I don’t think it was. Processing the breakup through this act of rereading, redoubling, and remembering revolved around the neutral cruelty of repetition. As Carson writes,

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days. It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape…

After you walk away from a last good-bye, the terrain of everyday life is suddenly overlaid with the haunted geography of an entire relationship. Every space is layered with the fine sediment of recollection. Any time you trip and reach out for balance, your hand might accidentally slip “down // into time” and dredge up something beautiful or awful from those years or months or weeks past.

Did he really want to see me, or did he simply want to be allowed to see something, to be granted the pleasure of mere access?

The self, too, is multiplied, and might cross itself if you are not careful. As time slides and aligns and blurs, so too does Carson’s speaker feel her present self slip into a past self of the hot last April, inhabiting simultaneously a then-“she,” trapped in memory, and a now-“I,” writing in the present. Typing these lines, even now I feel my heartbeat double for a moment with syncopated desire. I feel the chilly presence of my own ghostly double from this time last year; she is sitting at this same desk, awaiting Luck’s response to a long email of supplication, nauseated by the mingling of hope and exhaustion.

The looped rereading of “The Glass Essay” made everything feel like the present, rather than the past. All the moments with Luck were there at once, and all the selves that I had been in relation to him, too. The self reading Carson in the library; the self lying on my floor a few weeks earlier, asking him what he thought love was; the self dashing around cooking dinner with him in his tiny kitchen. Il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti, to crib Dante’s mystical phrase: “the point when all the times are present.” The ritualized rereading of “The Glass Essay” summoned all these times and held them in shimmering alignment, just as Carson’s speaker feels moments overlapping in the poem. I wonder if a part of me still believed, childishly, that the repeated incantation of a name or a phrase is a powerful summoning spell—you know, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.” (Luck, Luck, Luck.) Could the repeated reading of a poem bring its words into my actual life in a consequential way? In those weeks, I did feel something uncanny was coming over me and Oxford, which was bleached unfamiliar shades of straw and gold by the drought. I couldn’t tell if this was an effect of the text or of my compulsive rereading of it.

Of course, Carson’s poem enacts a similar question: it is itself a lyric essay on rereading Emily Brontë, and how this rereading leads the speaker to view the conditions of her life differently.

When it opens, the speaker has retreated to her mother’s house in the remote North to convalesce from the loss of Law. She takes with her:

…a lot of books—

some for my mother, some for me including The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë . This is my favourite author.

We find “Three silent women at the kitchen table”: Carson, her mother, and Emily, communicating blurrily as through an “atmosphere of glass.” The odd presence of Emily at that kitchen table, quietly lurking inside her book, made me think about the presence of Anne Carson in my own day-to-day activities, an Anne Carson I began to half-imagine as embodied rather than em- booked . Anne Carson jogging lightly beside me in the park, Anne Carson absent-mindedly humming behind me in the coffee queue, Anne Carson sitting opposite me in the library, leaning back coolly in her chair like a rebel in a high school movie, watching me read her poem for the thirteenth or twenty-third time.

This strange feeling of possession was itself mimetic of the poem. For just as I felt myself inhabiting Carson’s “I,” so does Carson’s speaker feel herself doubling her “favourite author.” Yet Emily, writes Carson, is also

…my main fear, which I mean to confront. Whenever I visit my mother I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,

my lonely life around me like a moor, my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation that dies when I come in the kitchen door.

All the things I was warned away from as a professional student of literature—not to confuse the poet with the speaker, not to get mired in biography, not to be fooled by the cheap lure of identification—went out the window as this possession overcame us. We were three silent women, moving through the pages of books and years. Carson peered into Brontë’s poems as I peered into her own poem, looking for—something.

It was never clear what Emily herself was looking for. Such is the mystery of her strange life and her strange work. In her 1850 preface to Wuthering Heights, Emily’s sister Charlotte writes with the awed fascination of a villager peering into the darkness of an anchorite’s cell. Emily, in Carson’s quotation of the preface, “was not a person of demonstrative character.” Indeed, even “those nearest and dearest to her” could not “with impunity, intrude unlicensed” into the recesses of her mind. Even Charlotte expresses a fearful respect for the secrecy of those alarming “recesses”: the deep, secret self that her sister guarded so sternly. Emily is always one more locked door away from both those who loved her in life and those who love her work. To get closest to her work is to accept that you will never see to the bottom of those recesses. Charlotte recognizes this, and Carson does too.

luck was always trying to plumb my depths, in a manner I found both sweet and offensive. He always wanted more and wouldn’t believe me when I said I’d told him everything. When eventually he saw that I really had given him everything I knew about myself, he found the offering wanting. A few weeks into our relationship, I began to experience the well-intentioned ferocity of his desire to understand me better than I understood myself. He wasn’t really a drinker, but he poured us both a scotch and alternatingly interrogated and flirted with me. I was attracted and confused. Here was someone who wanted to know more about me, but his playful manner of asking very serious questions made his desire seem like part of a game. Did he really want to see me, or did he simply want to be allowed to see something , to be granted the pleasure of mere access?

The idea of seeing, really seeing, was more important to him than it was to anyone I’d ever known. On our second or third date, he casually told me that he was face-blind—a condition I’d never heard of. He was, as he said, “bad at faces.” This was a self-deprecating understatement. Over the next few weeks, he told me more about his particular condition. It would take him, he estimated, twenty or thirty meetings with someone to be able to recognize that person’s face. If I put my hair up or let it down, took my glasses off or put them on, he suddenly saw me as a stranger. This explained, I thought, the way he’d pause and examine my face every time we met, a smile playing around his lips, looking for the person he was coming to know. The longer we were together, the more his face-blindness confused me: How much did he recognize me? How much did it matter if he didn’t or couldn’t ever? I came to terms with this, telling myself that at the very least, I would always know if he found me attractive. My fear was that one day, out of the blue, he wouldn’t. It worried me—and in some way I’ll never understand, I’m sure it worried him too.

Thinking about him now, I have to stop myself from narrative reduction, the cruelest thing I could do to a person I still care about. Luck is not just a character in my story; he has his own. It’s too easy to draw a neat, simplistic parallel: Luck felt he never really recognized me emotionally because his brain actually couldn’t recognize me physically. That’s not it, though. Looking back, I begin to understand that he was also peering into me in the hope that he would find a mirror that could show him his truest self, that would instructively reveal what he looked like in love. I don’t say this with resentment but rather with what remains of love. I wonder how many relationships between mindfully, often proudly, self-reflective people are like this—how often do we look into our partners in order to see ourselves more clearly? Another kind of compulsive rereading, you might say. To look into the person you’re with over and over again, telling yourself that you’re trying to comprehend them more fully, can simply be a means of understanding your own reading self. This self that reads other people is not exactly the same as the self that might read a poem—but it is not entirely different. It took me a long time to realize that I did not want to be a mirror to reflect Luck or a text to enable his readings. I grew tired of being peered at and tired of trying to see through the thick, impenetrable glass of his own surface.

the metaphor is so obvious I barely need to articulate it. Luck peered into me to see himself, then I peered into Carson to see myself, as she peered into Brontë in turn—a nested series of readings and rereadings in the search for newer, deeper meanings. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time; my immersion in Carson’s poem was so total that I couldn’t take even a step back. I only started to perceive these twinned phenomena somewhere around week three of the Carson regimen.

For Carson, the intense peering activates a powerful, frightening mode of self-reflection, wherein she seems to see right through the illusory exterior of emotion into somewhere more profound and, eventually, more generative. She supplements her reading with periods of rhapsodic meditation, in which a series of twelve female “Nudes” appears to her, visions that she understands to be “a nude glimpse of [her] lone soul, / not the complex mysteries of love and hate.” The Nudes are primitively symbolic, tarot-like, their imagery at once hotly interior and coldly objectified. They are violent: a woman’s body in agony, flesh ripped away, or pierced by thorns, or stitched by a giant silver needle. They infiltrate me as profoundly as the poem’s images of passion. They summon up familiar visions I’d long held at bay: flashbacks to fantasies of my body rendered down, sliced or melted away, accompanied by the familiar scent of self-harm’s alchemical compound of desire and terror.

The poem hurt me and made me think about the nature of that pain after I’d felt it over and over again.

Here, though, my identification with Carson begins to unravel and lift away. The instant that I’ve followed her into the madness of these barest visions of her inner self and my own, she turns back to Brontë’s complex visions, which seem at once to face inward and outward, a mobile vantage from which she does not peer but rather radiates. In Emily’s poetry (Carson writes), she “had a relationship…with someone she calls Thou,” who may be God or Death, or something undefined. Emily, in her apparent isolation, seems to have had a clearer understanding than I of how to relate to the other, even if her other is a force, not a person. It seems strange to turn for advice on love to Emily Brontë, a woman who was “unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,” and according to her biographers led a “sad, stunted life…Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment / and despair.” Yet it is through Brontë that Carson—and through Carson, I—begin to really ask the fundamental questions: How are we to look at the loved one, and how are we to look at ourselves? Weird Emily, communing intermittently with Thou, might offer some kind of better answer than what I’d gleaned from human relationships for how to be held closely yet at a distance, in some state of perpetual transit between the “inside outside” and the “outside inside.” “Thou and Emily influence one another in the darkness,” writes Carson, “playing near and far at once.” Something about this seeming paradox of location, near and far, inside and outside, and the way that Emily flits between the two, seems to hold some promise of escaping the mere self. Her word for this is “whaching”:

Whacher, Emily’s habitual spelling of this word, has caused confusion.

Whacher is what she was. She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night. She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke. She whached the poor core of the world, wide open.

Whaching is not simply watching; while she whached things we can all observe, like “humans” and “actual weather,” she also whached those things that cannot be seen or known, like “God” and “the poor core of the world.” Whaching somehow allows her to be at once inside and outside of herself; by whaching, Emily breaks “the bars of time” and seems to exist outside its prison. Somehow, whaching is less an action than a state of being:

To be a Whacher is not a choice. There is nowhere to get away from it…

To be a Whacher is not in itself sad or happy.

To whach, it seems, is a calling. If Emily is a Whacher, then so too is Carson by the end of the poem—but only after she stops trying so hard to watch, to “peer and glance,” seeking symbolic meaning or resolution, seeking to solve the problem of herself with and without Law. After the period of rereading Brontë, staring into herself, and seeing the Nudes, the whole thing simply stops:

I stopped watching. I forgot about Nudes. I lived my life,

which felt like a switched-off TV. Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.

At first, this moment feels deflating, emptied of the exhilaration of what she earlier calls her “spiritual melodrama” and intense feeling. But then something amazing happens. When the speaker, and the reader, least expect it, the poem ends with a final vision, a thirteenth Nude. Though it resembles the first Nude—the woman standing naked and bloody on a hill, strips of flesh flayed by the wind—this figure is not in pain. It stands, neutral and unflinching,

…a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. And there was no pain. The wind

was cleansing the bones. They stood forth silver and necessary. It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all. It walked out of the light.

This Nude is not flesh, but bone: shining, bright bone, “silver and necessary,” somehow stripped of individual identity but not of communal feeling. This Nude, I think, is somewhere between “I” and “Thou,” between body and what we might call spirit, at once physical and mystical, “the body of us all.”

On one of the late Carson days, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday of the fourth week, this moment gave me a new shock. I did not know what it meant; I think I still do not understand it. But it led me to consider my own spiritual melodrama, and my ways of peering and rereading. All that bloody revealing, that squinting and seeking, hadn’t gotten down to the bones of the situation. It didn’t open up the poor core of my world or any other; it only abandoned me in the foggy region between past and present, my vision clouded by layers of feeling. Suddenly, these methods of reading were clearly insufficient. I was not whaching right, and I knew it. But I was learning.

Learning to whach meant getting both closer and farther away from my deep identification with the poem’s speaker. It meant realizing that my reflection was not the thing to look for, despite the shining surfaces of the poem. The closer I got to the poem as a whole, the farther I got from myself; the farther I got from the self, the more clearly could I see it. The poem hurt me and made me think about the nature of that pain after I’d felt it over and over again. It taught me a lesson in how to slip, like Emily, outside the prison of the self-in-time to see that self from the inside and the outside simultaneously. To whach.

Thinking of what it means to whach, I wonder if it is some form of the discipline I was trained in, which scholars call criticism, and which I am tempted now just to call “reading.” Perhaps not reading as it is usually performed by so-called professional readers (critics, teachers, writers), but reading as it might be wholly integrated into lived experience. “The Glass Essay” is not just a breakup poem that demands to be read as a critical essay, or a critical essay that demands to be read as a breakup poem; it is somehow neither and both of these at once. Carson learns to whach from Brontë, and in so doing, learns finally to whach herself. A critical stance, the poem suggests, is needed to read and reread the most intimate feelings in ourselves and in others. This kind of reading is the necessary approach to personal experience, an imperative that demands a reinvention, or perhaps a radically earnest reaffirmation, of criticism’s scholarly intent.

I read “The Glass Essay” differently now. In that month of rereading, I was peering so intently at it for my own reflection, trying to scry my own feelings, the resolution of my own sadness. But now that those feelings are gone, I can look at the poem and the breakup through the transparent pane of that old reading, which both keeps me outside that old reading self and lets me see her from the inside, clearly. I can see her, and the poem, and the loss of Luck more lucidly than before because I am not looking for anything anymore. I am not looking for myself in Carson’s reading of Brontë, or in Carson’s Nudes, or in Carson’s breakup story. I stand outside it now, whaching, but no longer reflected, no longer reflecting.

The Shapes of Grief

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History Cooperative

Who Invented Glasses? The History of Eyeglasses and Their Evolution Over Time

Eyeglasses, also known as spectacles or simply two small magnifying glasses, have had a profound impact on the lives of countless individuals by enhancing and correcting their vision. This invention has not only improved the quality of life for people with vision impairments but has also played a role in various fields, from science and literature to art and fashion.

The invention of the first eyeglasses paved the way for further developments in optical technology and set the stage for innovations such as microscopes and telescopes, which transformed our understanding of the universe. Over the centuries, glasses have become not only a functional tool but also a fashion statement, with various styles and designs reflecting changing trends and individual preferences.

Table of Contents

Who Invented Glasses?

Salvino D’Armate, an Italian is often celebrated for this invention although his exact contributions are enveloped in controversy. Historical anecdotes attribute to D’Armate the invention of wearable eyeglasses in the late 13th century; however, these accounts are often countered by evidence suggesting that eyeglasses, in some primordial form, were already in existence. This contradiction underscores the role played by numerous unsung individuals, each contributing incremental advancements that collectively paved the way for the eyeglasses we recognize today.

The Middle Ages, a crucible of innovation, witnessed significant strides in optical understanding. Monks and scholars, the erudite minds of their time, played a pivotal role in this era’s collective advancements. Their need to read sacred texts and manuscripts for hours on end spurred the development of a device that could correct the wearying eyesight that many experienced.

This period saw a synthesis of collaborative knowledge, where shared insights across scholarly communities laid the groundwork for the conceptualization and eventual creation of early eyeglasses.

When Were Glasses Invented?

Pinpointing the exact moment in history when glasses came into being is a complex endeavor, as the invention of eyeglasses wasn’t an event, but rather a process, an evolution of ideas and technologies over time . However, certain historical records and artifacts provide us with a window into this elusive genesis.

Fragments of evidence suggest that the rudimentary forms of eyeglasses emerged between the 13th and early 14th centuries, a time rife with intellectual growth and technological innovation. The socio-political environment of this era, characterized by the growth of cities and the rise of literate bureaucracies, catalyzed the dissemination of new inventions, albeit with record-keeping that often left much to be desired.

The 13th century marked a significant period in the proliferation of glasses, particularly across Europe. Their appearance seemed almost synchronous with the era’s increased intellectual fervor and artistic renaissance. Glasses were no longer a mere concept but had materialized into a tangible solution to a common human ailment. Their spread was not instantaneous but rather gradual, reflecting the era’s communication methods and the exclusivity of knowledge.

Trade routes and the rise of merchant classes played an instrumental role in the distribution of eyeglasses. As traders traversed continents, they carried with them goods, cultures, and ideas. Eyeglasses, a commodity both practical and revolutionary, were a natural fit for this early form of global commerce.

Merchants, along with scholars and missionaries, facilitated the journey of eyeglasses from secluded workshops in the corners of Europe to the wider world, setting the stage for their global presence today.

How Are Glasses Made?

The craftsmanship behind eyeglasses, both past and present, is a fascinating blend of art and science. In their earliest form, the production of glasses was a meticulous process, heavily reliant on the skilled hands of artisans.

The materials initially used were rudimentary, with lenses crafted from natural crystals like quartz, and frames typically constructed from metal or bone. The shaping of lenses was a particularly delicate art, requiring precision to ensure the correct magnification, while frames were designed for practicality, balancing durability with comfort.

Fast forward to the present day, and the manufacturing of eyeglasses has been transformed by technological advancements. Contemporary production utilizes a diverse array of materials, from lightweight plastics and polycarbonates for lenses to various metals and synthetic materials for frames. The process has evolved to incorporate digital precision; prescription customization involves sophisticated machinery that maps the lens’s design down to the minutest detail, ensuring not only clarity but also comfort in vision correction.

Yet, the journey from raw materials to a pair of eyeglasses on someone’s nose is governed by stringent quality control and industry standards. These standards are in place to guarantee the safety and efficacy of eyeglasses. They dictate everything from the resilience of the lens materials, ensuring they can withstand impact, to the protection they provide from ultraviolet light . Comfort, too, is a science of its own — frames are ergonomically designed and subjected to an array of stress tests, all to ensure they can maintain their form and comfort under the rigors of daily use.

This evolution in manufacturing, from the simplest hand-shaped eyeglass lenses to today’s high-tech production lines, reflects broader themes of human progress: the relentless pursuit of perfection, the marriage of aesthetics and utility, and the ever-present quest to improve the tools that enhance our daily lives.

What Was the Original Purpose of Glasses?

Glasses emerged as a beacon of clarity amidst a world where aging individuals found themselves increasingly enveloped in a visual haze. Presbyopia, the gradual, often frustrating loss of the eyes’ ability to focus on close objects, was the bane of the aging population.

This common affliction prompted the creation of eyeglasses, initially designed as reading aids. These were not the accessories of fashion or markers of intellectualism we might consider today; they were practical tools, a means for the aging, particularly scholars and skilled artisans, to continue their work with the same proficiency and precision as in their youth.

The societal implications of vision correction went beyond the personal relief of being able to see clearly; it had profound impacts on literacy and productivity. In historical contexts where reading and writing were privileges accessible to a select few, the invention of eyeglasses marked a monumental shift.

Glasses extended the productive years of scholars, scribes, and readers, allowing for an expansion in the production and reading of manuscripts and, subsequently, the preservation and dissemination of knowledge. This era saw an unprecedented surge in intellectual life, with eyeglasses as unsung heroes in the background, subtly fueling what would be significant cultural and intellectual revolutions.

Moreover, the original eyeglasses served as a testament to the ingenuity of humans in catering to the natural process of aging. They affirmed that physical limitations could be overcome with clever contrivances, and in doing so, they redefined what it meant to grow old. By mitigating the effects of presbyopia, wearing glasses helped foster a societal association between age and wisdom, as the elder scholars and craftsmen could continue their contributions to society unimpeded by failing sight.

What Did People Do Before Glasses?

Before the advent of eyeglasses, individuals with vision impairments employed a variety of strategies to cope with their limited sight. Primitive methods included squinting or using handheld objects with small apertures to peer through, reducing the amount of scattered light and marginally enhancing focus. These rudimentary techniques, while offering slight relief, were far from solutions and often led to eye strain and fatigue.

The implications of poor vision in times preceding glasses were not merely physical but also societal. Occupational avenues were invariably limited for those unable to see well. Many crafts and trades, especially those requiring precision and a keen eye, were inaccessible. Daily life, too, was fraught with challenges; simple tasks we take for granted became monumental hurdles. The inability to see clearly also impacted learning and the acquisition of knowledge, confining many to the fringes of scholarly pursuits and literacy.

Culturally, attitudes toward poor vision were mixed. In some circles, impaired sight was synonymous with wisdom and experience, a sign of years spent in study or craftsmanship. However, more broadly, poor vision was often stigmatized. Without a means of correction, it relegated individuals to a life viewed through a perpetual blur, a world defined by its lack of clarity both literally and metaphorically.

The absence of vision correction solutions had yet another unintended consequence: it spurred incredible ingenuity in other sensory adaptations. Those with poor sight often developed heightened reliance on touch, hearing, and memory, showcasing the remarkable resilience and adaptability of the human spirit. This era, shadowed by a struggle against biological limitations, set the stage for the welcome reception of eyeglasses, a solution that would eventually illuminate the lives of many, breaking barriers and redefining possibilities.

The Evolution of Eyewear Fashion

Over the centuries, eyeglasses have undergone a remarkable transformation, assuming a role beyond their practical application to become significant cultural artifacts. Initially perceived as medical aids, the place of prescription glasses in society was revolutionized as they became symbols of intellect, dignity, and prestige.

Iconic historical figures, from Benjamin Franklin with his bifocals to Theodore Roosevelt with his pince-nez, have immortalized glasses as emblems of wisdom and leadership. This shift marked the beginning of eyeglasses’ journey from functional items to fashion statements.

In more contemporary eras, the fashion industry’s influence has catapulted eyewear into the realm of haute couture. Celebrities, fashion designers, and influencers have embraced glasses, not merely as vision correctors, but as must-have accessories, integral to one’s personal style. This evolution mirrors broader societal shifts, where individuality and self-expression reign supreme. The modern eyewear market caters to an eclectic array of tastes and styles, offering everything from the minimalistic to the flamboyant.

This fashion metamorphosis also speaks volumes about societal attitudes towards vision impairment. Where once glasses might have been a sign of physical weakness, they are now a symbol of sophistication, intelligence, or a laid-back, approachable vibe. They accentuate personality, hint at the intellectual, and add an allure that’s both academic and stylish.

Furthermore, the fashion evolution of eyewear underscores a crucial aspect of human behavior: our innate desire to transform necessity into art. Glasses, once purely utilitarian, are now a platform for artistic expression, a testament to our perpetual quest for beauty and style in all facets of life. This transformative journey of eyeglasses highlights not just a change in design and perception, but a profound cultural shift in how we view (quite literally) ourselves and the world around us.

The invention of eyeglasses represents a remarkable and enduring achievement in human history. From the rudimentary experiments with magnification in ancient times to the refined designs introduced by Salvino D’Armate in the late 13th century, glasses have played a transformative role in the lives of countless individuals and in various aspects of human culture and knowledge.

The invention of glasses not only improved the quality of life for those with vision impairments but also laid the foundation for numerous technological advancements. It set the stage for the development of optical instruments like microscopes and telescopes, which revolutionized fields such as biology, astronomy, and physics. Glasses have not only helped us see better but also enabled us to explore the unseen and distant realms of our world and the universe.

Moreover, modern glasses have become a symbol of style and identity. The diverse range of frames (leather frames, plastic frames, metal frames, etc.) and lenses available today such as prescription lenses, corrective lenses, convex lenses, concave lenses, glass lenses, cylindrical lenses, progressive lenses, tinted lenses, multifocal lenses, etc.) reflects changing fashion trends and personal preferences. They have transcended their utilitarian origins to become a form of self-expression, a reflection of individuality, and a statement of personal style.

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How Did Glasses Become a Fashion Statement?

Originally created to correct eyesight issues, glasses are increasingly described as being a fashion accessory. But just how did glasses shift from being functional to fashionable?

Eyesight issues are common throughout the world. Short-sightedness is one of the most prevalent eyesight ailments, but people also suffer from long-sightedness, partial blindness and other eye diseases. In many of these cases, vision can often be significantly improved with glasses.

In recent decades, there has been explosion in the numbers of people wearing glasses. Although sight issues are increasing within the population, this isn’t the only reason why people are wearing glasses. Even with contact lenses or corrective surgery being a possibility for many people, lots of individuals are choosing glasses for fashion and stylistic reasons. Indeed, it seems that many people would prefer to have a pair of Gucci eyeglasses over making their eye issues invisible through contact lenses.

Here’s a closer look at how the world got to this place of glasses being regarded as high fashion.

Helping the World to See

The origin of glasses goes back far longer than many people think. The concept of a lens helping to magnify an image was first described by Ptolemy, who lived between 100 and 170 AD, in his works called Optics . It was in the 1200s that the first eyeglasses were created, most probably in Pisa in Italy. The craft of making eyeglasses subsequently took off in Venice. Nearby Murano was well known for making incredibly high-quality glass, and Venice was gaining a reputation for being a center of manufacturing. A Venetian guild of spectacle makers was even founded in 1320.

The first visual confirmation that glasses were being widely used in societies hundreds of years ago comes from the art world. A portrait of Hugh de Provence, painted by Tommaso da Modena in 1352, shows this cardinal wearing eyeglasses. There are many more examples of people wearing glasses in paintings after this date. The world’s first specialist glasses shop opened in 1466 in Strasbourg. With a strong heritage in Italy in France – now also known as global centers of fashion – it is certainly interesting how glasses would go on to be trendy fashion accessories.

Emerging Designs

Although glasses would not go on to become fashion items until much later, the ensuing developments in glasses show how different styles started to come to the fore.

Glasses were originally designed as eye pieces to be held by hand, or a pair of lenses with a bridge that could balance on the nose. A British optician is thought to have designed glasses as we know them today, held by handles that slot over the ears, in around the 1700s. Various other styles, such as ‘scissors glasses’ and lorgnettes, were designed just after this, and were said to be popular in some societies.

Style and Celebrities

It was only really from the 1970s onwards that glasses started to become fashionable. While some other designs existed, most eyeglasses up to this point were round with wire frames. In the 1970s, there was a realization that glasses could come in different shapes and sizes. Previously seen as an aid to help correct a visual disability , glasses became a true fashion statement for the first time. This is partly to do with inventive designs coming onto the market, and partly due to celebrities choosing statement-making frames to accessorize their outfits. This propelled glasses head-first into the world of fashion.

Even before this era, some celebrities and famous faces are said to have helped make the wearing of glasses more socially acceptable. In the United States, many people cite Theodore Roosevelt as being one individual who helped break down the stigma of glasses being unfashionable. Later on, the likes of John Lennon from The Beatles, and the singer-songwriter Buddy Holly, helped to make glasses seem cool. Glasses have also been used in films to inspire people to embrace eyeglasses, such as Clark Kent in the Superman films. Movie stars themselves also helped to make sunglasses popular. While many people believe this is because they see themselves as being famous and cool, film stars actually started wearing tinted glasses because of the bright studio lights! 

In more recent times, there have been many celebrities keeping the trend of fashionable glasses going. This includes the rapper Jay-Z, who is often seen wearing a simple pair of black frames, which is also the preferred look of Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds. Bold tinted glasses, such as those worn by Elton John, are very much part of his eccentric style. And while this might seem more of the unusual style that Lady Gaga would incorporate into one of her outfits too, the singer and actress also wears simple black frames to show off a different side of her personality when she is off stage. Whether it’s a comedian who doesn’t seem especially style conscious, such as Chris Rock, or an actor already known for suave looks even without glasses, such as Ryan Gosling, it seems that everyone has a ‘glasses look’ they want to embrace sometimes!

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The Glass Essay

27 pages • 54 minutes read

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The Different Meanings of Emily Brontë

Aside from adding to the themes of imprisonment, voices, and heartbreak, Emily Brontë functions as a symbol in “The Glass Essay.” Throughout the poem, Emily symbolizes companionship, fear, the speaker, and competition.

At the start of the poem, Emily symbolizes a friend. The speaker is going to visit her mother, who lives alone. For companionship, the speaker brings “a lot of books” (Line 15). The one book the speaker identifies is The Collected Works of Emily Brontë , while none of the other books are ever named. The Collected Works of Emily Brontë is special—the speaker has a rapport with Emily and speaks to her as if they are friends. “What meat is it, Emily, we need?” (Line 25) she asks her. At the start of the section “THREE,” the speaker portrays Emily as if she is no different from her or her mother, noting, “Three silent women at the kitchen table” (Line 26). It is as if Emily is alive and has joined the speaker at her mother’s house.

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Home / Guides / The Evolution of Glasses Styles

Glasses Through the Decades: The Evolution of Glasses Styles

• Invention of Eyeglasses
• 1920s–1930s
• 1940s–1950s
• 1960s–1970s

The history of eyewear is long and not just limited to the past century. In fact, experts believe that glasses have been around since the beginning of time. Ancient Egyptians are believed to have worn them as early as 2000 BC, and Romans wore them too. 

However, we can definitely say that today’s eyeglasses (as we know them) started appearing in the late 1800s.

In this article, we’ll look at how eyeglasses have evolved over the past century — from their humble beginnings all the way up to modern-day styles.

The Invention of Eyeglasses

While no conclusive proof exists that any particular person invented eyeglasses, many claim it. 

Salvino D’Armate is generally accredited with the invention of eyeglasses in the 13th century. He was known for his expertise in optics and lenses, but most notably, he made a curved lens that could be used to focus light so that it would be clearer to the human eye. 

The first pair of eyeglasses were shaped like a pair of spectacles, with two lenses made out of quartz crystal. Metal frames held together these lenses and could be adjusted to fit the wearer’s face. They had no hinges, so they could not be folded up or down like modern-day glasses. 

The early version of these glasses didn’t have any corrective power, but they did allow people with poor eyesight to see better. Over time, more and more people began using these glasses. Their design continued to improve until someone created what we know today as eyeglasses.

1900: Becoming of Pince-Nez Monocles

The 1900s were an era of transformation. The Industrial Revolution occurred, and people were beginning to think about how to use this new technology to improve their lives. 

This also marked a time of great innovation in the field of eyewear. The monocle was born in this decade. 

Men and women wore monocles, but they were mostly associated with the upper classes. The first monocles in history were made of glass and had a wire loop that the wearer would place over their ear. 

Worn by prominent figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Anton Chekov, this rimless frame sits on your nose bridge, which can be incredibly difficult to get used to. The upper crust of 19th-century English society made up the main clientele for this enduring trend.

The Round Frames of the 1920s–1930s

The 1920s and 1930s were an era of experimentation in all areas, including eyewear. It was also a time of considerable change in American culture. Round glasses symbolized sophistication and elegance, and both men and women wore them.

During this time, women were beginning to step out of the shadow of their husbands. The 1920s may not be remembered for their activism, but they played a crucial role in championing freedom between the sexes and among minorities. Consequently, round frames became quite popular among liberated women. 

The round frames first became popular in 1929, when Sam Foster sold sunglasses on boardwalks on the Jersey Shore. Round eyeglasses are characterized by their circular shape. The frames can be thick or thin but never angular. 

While it would take some time for them to catch on among the masses, early Hollywood stars were wearing them.

The 1940s–1950s: Browline Frames, Aviators, and the Classic Cat Eye Shape

This decade is well known as an era of war and reconstruction. The United States was not only being rebuilt but also being pushed forward into the future.

Fashion began to change during this decade, and many glasses styles became popular, including browline, aviators, and cat-eye glasses.

Browline Glasses 

In the 1950s, a new type of frame was introduced: browline glasses. Browline glasses are a classic for a reason. They’re classy, timeless, and go with pretty much anything. But where did they get their name?

Browline glasses got their name from their shape and design. They have a prominent browline, which is the part of the frame that sits across the top of your face. These glasses were popular in the 1950s, so much so that they accounted for half of all eyeglass sales. 

They became popular because they were flattering and easy to wear for both men and women. You could get them in any color or shape, so there was no reason not to buy a pair.

Aviator sunglasses are one of eyewear’s most iconic and recognizable styles. Aviators were originally used in the late 1930s to shield pilots’ eyes from the sun’s rays when flying, but it wasn’t until 1940 that they became popularized for the general public.

These glasses were designed with a lightweight metal frame and had no nose pads, which made them easy to wear for people who wore them while flying airplanes. They also had thick lenses that gave the wearer a wider field of vision and did not obstruct their view.

While aviator sunglasses became fashionable in the 1940s due to photos of General Douglas MacArthur, their popularity soared in the 1950s when celebrities like Marlon Brando wore them out in public. Their popularity as a fashion statement led to soaring sales.

Cat-Eye Eyeglasses

A trend that swept the nation in the 1950s was the thin browline, which eventually gave way to another style — the cat eye. The only difference was that cat eye eyeglasses were bracketed by angled corners rather than square ones like those worn by browline glasses.

Their edgy look made it appealing to young people, but their versatility allowed adults of all ages to wear them.

The cat-eye shape was especially popular among women who wanted to look glamorous or sophisticated. During this time, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and other icons of the 1950s were often spotted in this style.

Cat-eye eyeglasses eventually became a fashion statement in their own right and were often embellished with artistic flair. Eventually, colored and shaped lenses were added to the design, and the production of unusually shaped lenses became popular. 

The popularity of cat-eye eyeglasses has ebbed and flowed over the years as trends come and go, but they’ve always been a fun way to express one’s personality. Today, you can find cat-eye eyeglasses in many different colors, styles, and shapes.

The 1960s–1970s: Geometric Shapes, Teashades & Oversized Frames

In the 1960s, the world was changing. People were starting to question what was considered normal and how they looked at the world reflected that. When it came to eyewear, that meant the bigger, the better.

The round teashade first appeared on the catwalk in the early 1960s. This style was soon adopted by many celebrities and artists, including John Lennon and Mick Jagger, who made them even more popular. Some say that this was because it helped hide their drug use, while others say it was simply because they liked how it looked.

Whatever the reason, the round teashade is still considered by many as one of fashion’s most iconic trends.

In the 1970s, both Mods and hippies ruled the fashion world with their love of oversized specs in round or geometric shapes. These glasses were so big that they became a signature look for both groups — a look that has endured to this day.

The oversized glasses trend was also popularized by the style of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who was known for her love of these types of glasses.

1980: The Classic Wayfarer

The Wayfarer-style frame is a classic, and it’s easy to see why. With its flare-shaped lens, this style of glasses is the perfect combination of retro chic and modern technology. 

The style was first introduced in 1952 by Ray-Ban. During the early days, it was worn by all types of celebrities, from Audrey Hepburn to John Lennon to James Dean. However, it wasn’t until 1983, when Tom Cruise wore these glasses in a movie, that the style became popular again.

Rounded edges, a prominent nose bridge, and an oval lens shape characterize the design of these glasses. The shape of the lens and frames make this style very flattering on most faces, making them a popular choice for people who want something fun yet functional.

For this reason, the classic Wayfarer style has been around for decades and is still going strong.

Minimalist Oval Glasses for 1990

The 1980s were a decade of excess, while the 1990s were all about minimalism.

The decade was all about sleek, streamlined frames that could be worn with any outfit in any decade. We saw a lot of bold, thick frames (the kind you’d expect to see on someone who really knows what they’re doing) while also seeing lots of thin, rounded styles.

But what really made the decade stand out were the asymmetrical and artsy shapes — lenses that curved and swooped along their edges like modern art. They were all about bringing back old trends while still keeping up with the latest styles.

These glasses were part of a fashion cycle that would go through many iterations before finally settling down in the 2000s.

The 2000s: Rimless, Oversized & Bold

It was the dawn of a new millennium — a time of rebellion and reinvention. While this decade had plenty of low-rise jeans and crop tops, the sunglasses rebelled against their 1990s predecessors by swinging the other way. Giant pairs in all shapes and colors became staples.

The boldness didn’t stop there. Oversized frames were paired with bold colors like reds and greens, while rimless glasses gave an avant-garde look to anyone who wore them.

Transparency was huge in the 2000s, and glasses makers quickly jumped on the trend. From Dolce & Gabbana’s futuristic frames to Versace’s high-end sunglasses, the most popular styles for eyewear in the 2000s included bright colors and clunky plastic frames that were anything but subtle.

These glasses were very bold and dramatic — and also very popular. They were worn by celebrities such as Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Britney Spears.

2010 Eyewear: The Return of Aviators & Rectangular Frames

This was a decade of reflection and renewal, and that was reflected in the glasses trends. What was old became new again.

Aviators came back in a big way, with their iconic shape making an appearance everywhere. Rectangular frames also came back, bringing a bit of edge to otherwise simple designs. 

Mirrored sunnies were also popular. They are ideal for anyone going for the edgy look but still wanting to keep things lighthearted.

The decade saw a lot of experimentation with styles from previous decades — the 1980s in particular — and some new twists on classic shapes that had never been seen before.

2022 Eyewear Trends

In 2022, glasses are more than just something you wear on your face. Over the years, they have become a fashion accessory and a statement piece, like jewelry or perfume. 

In addition to an emergence of functional trends, we’ve seen a resurgence in the popularity of vintage-inspired frames and an increase in the popularity of glasses overall. 

There are a few reasons for this. First, glasses are no longer seen as a necessity for those with poor vision. They’re now considered fashion accessories, which means more people are willing to experiment with different styles. 

We’re seeing more and more people who don’t need glasses wearing them just because they love their style. As we spend more time on screens, more people are wearing computer glasses or blue light glasses to minimize some of the effects of blue light and eye strain.

Additionally, we can now create more intricate designs thanks to technological advances. Celebrities and style icons have helped to make glasses cool again.

There’s no doubt that glasses will continue to remain at the forefront of fashion. In 2023 and beyond, we expect to see continued popularity of some timeless styles as well as new trends on the horizon.

The History of Glasses . (March 2022). One Sight.

19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution . (February 2022). National Archives.

High-Class Glass . TV Tropes.

The Effect of Blue-Light Blocking Spectacle Lenses . (November 2017). Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics .

Computers, Digital Devices and Eye Strain . (March 2020). American Academy of Ophthalmology.

The Quest for Clearer Vision: The History of Eyeglasses . (March 2019). Pennsylvania College of Optometry.

History of Eyewear: 1500-1775 . (July 2021). The Optical Journal.

History of Eyewear: Antiquity to 1499 . (June 2021). The Optical Journal.

Last Updated December 20, 2022

Note: This page should not serve as a substitute for professional medical advice from a doctor or specialist. Please review our about page for more information.

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The Quest for Clearer Vision: The History of Eyeglasses

• 27 March 2019

In the 13th century, glassworks in Murano, Italy was the only factory that had the ability to manufacture the soft glass essential to the manufacture of lenses. These glasses, called reading aids, had a convex ground lens. The edge was made from iron, horn or wood. In general, the first glasses were used exclusively as visual aids to enable far-sighted individuals to read.    

Later, the first eyeglass frame temples were made by Spanish craftsmen in 1600s. They affixed ribbons of silk or strings to the frame and looped them over the user's ears. The new types of eyeglasses were brought to China by Spanish and Italian missionaries. Instead of making loops, the Chinese attached small metal weights to the strings.  

The modern style of eyeglasses frame, which could be placed over the ears and nose, was invented in 1727 by British optician Edward Scarlett. These early eyeglasses had glass lenses set into heavy frames of wood, lead or copper. Natural materials of leather, bone and horn were later used for production of frames. In the early seventeenth century, lighter frames of steel were invented.

As eyeglasses continued to develop and the accuracy of prescriptions continued to improve, a trend started towards making glasses more fashionable. Frames could be made in different colors and styles to suit a person’s face.

Among improvements in appearance, improvements in the lenses were also made. American scientist, philosopher, and long-time Philadelphia resident, Benjamin Franklin is credited with the invention of bifocals, dividing his lenses for distant and near vision. These two lenses were held together in a metal frame.

Later on, Sir George Biddle Airy, an English astronomer and mathematician, invented glasses to correct astigmatism in 1827 which were meant to be held by hand. Later glasses were designed to be held in place by ribbon or by exerting pressure on the bridge of the nose, such as with pince-nez.

In the 1980s, plastic lenses were introduced, offering a more durable alternative to glass lenses. Ultimately, the eyeglasses we wear today are the result of centuries of improvement in both technology and knowledge.

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60 The Glass Menagerie Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on the glass menagerie, ✍️ the glass menagerie essay topics for college, 🎓 most interesting the glass menagerie research titles, 💡 simple the glass menagerie essay ideas.

• Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee William’s “Glass Menagerie”
• Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie
• Tom – A Tragic Hero of “The Glass Menagerie” by Williams
• Fire Escape in The Glass Menagerie by Williams
• Laura: Illusion and Reality in the Play “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Glass Menagerie: Analysis of Relationships
• The Glass Menagerie by T. Williams: An Analysis
• “Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams: Analysis The attachment to illusion and their inability to embrace reality is reiterated in every character in “Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams.
• The Glass Menagerie and Portrait of a Girl in Glass “The Glass Menagerie” play introduced the genre of a “memory play” to the theater, characterized by the unusual amount of freedom given to the playwright.
• “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams Throughout the play, Amanda seeks the better quality of life that her children should get. As life takes its own turns, it is seen as never happening the way people want it to happen.
• The Glass Menagerie and the Idea of the Escape The Glass Menagerie suggests that a person should not make a choice between chasing one’s dreams or staying put because it is possible to find the middle ground and do both.
• Symbol of Laura in Williams’ The Glass Menagerie The Glass Menagerie is a well-known play by Tennessee Williams, a prominent American playwright. This paper provides a possible interpretation of one of the aspects of play.
• Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams The life of playwright Tennessee Williams is reflected in his play The Glass Menagerie through the character of Tom Wingfield.
• The Play “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams The play “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, is a memory play since memory molds and inspires both its structure and its substance.
• The Glass Menagerie Play by Tennessee Williams Notably, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a tragic and largely autobiographical play that raises crucial questions of love, loneliness, and personal freedom.
• Amanda’s Influence on Laura in Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” The Glass Menagerie is a well-known Tennessee Williams’ play which partially relates to his bibliography. There were only four characters: Tom, Amanda, Laura, and Jim.
• The Glass Menagerie: The Roles of Amanda and Society The paper aims to prove that the social environment, rather than Amanda’s actions, caused the narrator’s family’s misfortune.
• “The Glass Menagerie” the Story by Tennessee Williams It is evident that both Amanda and Jim were admired and at the center of attention in the past, but their current state does not match their past ambitions and expectations.
• Protagonist in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee I believe that Tom is the protagonist of the play by Tennessee. The play revolves around the lives of three key characters. The three characters include Tom, Laura and Amanda.
• Three Visions of Time in Tennessee Williams’ Play “The Glass Menagerie”
• Irony and Distance in “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Problem of Identity in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Metaphorical Disability in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• Memory as Technique and Theme in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Analyzing Narrative Aspects and Plot of “The Glass Menagerie”
• Gender Role Socialization Between the Major Female Characters in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Media and Modernity in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• A Lacanian Study of Mother-Child Relationships in Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• Main Characters’ Personalities in the Play “The Glass Menagerie”
• Confinement and Freedom in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• Feminine Psyche in Tennessee Williams’ Play “The Glass Menagerie”
• Transitional Objects and Illusory Experiences: A Study of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• Expressionistic Technique of Presenting Narrator and Memory in “The Glass Menagerie”
• A Butlerian Study of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Composition of “The Glass Menagerie”: An Argument for Complexity
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• Tennessee Williams: The Uses of Declarative Memory in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Sexual Perversion of Laura Wingfield in Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
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• Attachment Anxiety & Covert Narcissistic Pangs in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Examining Autobiographical Elements in “The Glass Menagerie”
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• Laura Wingfield’s Inferiority Complex in Tennessee William’s “The Glass Menagerie”
• Tennessee Williams’s Dramatic Charade: Secrets and Lies in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Exploring Masculinity Values in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Modern Theatrical Technicalities in “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Cherry Orchard”: A Comparison
• The Conflict Between Reality and Illusion in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• Infantilized Adults and Intergenerational Stasis in “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Redeemers in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• Psychological Analysis of “The Glass Menagerie”: Laura’s Unsound Personality Causes
• The Rhetoric of Victimization in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
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• An Introvert Character as Seen in Tennessee William’s “The Glass Menagerie”
• Tom Wingfield’s Alienation in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• Analyzing Deontic Meanings in the Play “The Glass Menagerie”
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• Desire and the American Dream in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• An Analysis of Symbolism in Tennessee Williams’ Play “The Glass Menagerie”

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These essay examples and topics on The Glass Menagerie were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on September 12, 2024 .

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Spectacular vision: the symbolism of glasses in art

Posted 22 Jul 2020, by Aida Amoako

Wanting to Say I

Eugene Palmer (b.1955)

Self Portrait by Gaslight Looking Downwards 1949

Stanley Spencer (1891–1959)

Still Life with an open Book and Spectacles

William T. Howell Allchin (1844–1883)

Miss Norah Hall as Mrs Milsom in 'Call It a Day' by Dodie Smith c.1930

Alice Mary Edwards (1884–1963)

John Logie Baird (1888–1946) 1989

Stephen Conroy (b.1964)

Catherine Cookson (1906–1998) 1970

Arthur Spencer Roberts (1920–1997)

Councillor Shiraz Mirza (b.1952) 2000

Lead Eye Plaque

unknown artist

Campion Lady

Mildred 2005

Maria Jirat (b.1983)

The Money Changers 18th C

British (English) School (possibly)

Mrs O. Johnston (b.1934) 1996

Anthony Wilson Piper (b.1935)

The Immigrant 1960–1980

George Hodgkinson (1914–1997)

Portrait of a Gentleman in Glasses

Georges van Houten (1888–1964)

Elixir 2008

Barry James McGlashan (b.1974)

The German writers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Peter Eckermann were not big on glasses. The former thought 'they destroy all fair equality between us... for what do I gain from a man into whose eyes I cannot look when he is speaking?'

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) c.1800–1820

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) (follower of)

For Eckermann, glasses wearers were 'conceited' because their spectacles 'raise them to a degree of sensual perfection which is far above the power of their own nature.' But in their griping, I see sensitivities which could be summed up by what Neil Handley, curator of the British Optical Association Museum has called ' the psychology of wearing spectacles '. We most often encounter the symbolic power of spectacles in literature – Piggy's glasses in Lord of the Flies spring to mind – but for centuries art has reflected the meanings glasses have held for us since their invention.

A Venetian Procurator c.1620–1629

Jacopo Palma il giovane (1544/1548–1628) (style of)

The use of a glass lens as a visual aid has roots in antiquity, but the development of what more closely resembles what we call glasses, i.e. two circular lenses held together by a frame, began in Italy in the late thirteenth century. Religious scholars were among the first to develop a significant symbolic relationship with glasses. In fact, the first depiction of glasses in European art is in a series of frescoes in the church of St Nicholas, Treviso, which were completed by Tommaso da Modena in 1352. One panel depicts Cardinal Hugh of Saint-Cher  (c.1200–1263) in deep concentration, pen in hand and spectacles sitting high on the bridge of his nose.

Hugues de Saint-Cher

1352, fresco by Tommaso da Modena (1326–1379), in the chapter house of the church of San Nicolò, Treviso, Italy

In many depictions of Saint Jerome , who is known for translating the Bible into Latin, his glasses sit on or near his writing desk, presented to the viewer as the instrument of the scholar much in the way a stethoscope is irrevocably linked nowadays to doctors.

Saint Jerome in His Study possibly 16th C

Joos van Cleve (c.1485–1540 or 1541) (copy after) and Marinus van Reymerswaele (c.1490–c.1567) (copy after)

However, the appearance of glasses in the images of Cardinal Hugh and Saint Jerome are anachronistic: both figures lived and died well before their invention. But they show how early an association between wisdom and spectacles developed so that their appearance became a useful shorthand. In Saint Jerome's case, the anachronism was so persistent that he became the patron saint of spectacle makers.

Saint Jerome in His Study (copy after Domenico Ghirlandaio) 17th C/18thC

Italian School

By the fifteenth century, Florence was the centre of a thriving and innovative spectacle industry. By the sixteenth century, one could see spectacle pedlars on the streets of western Europe as the trade expanded to cities like Nuremberg, Germany where, in 1535, the establishment of regulations for the Spectacle Makers Guild sparked an industry with a reputation to rival the Italians.

The Misers , a seventeenth-century genre painting in the style of David Ryckaert III (1612–1661), depicts an elderly woman wearing Nuremberg-style nose spectacles as she and an elderly man weigh coins. The image conveys how, by this time, glasses had picked up negative connotations, and were often used to convey stinginess and culturally-disdained professions such as tax collecting.

The Misers 17th C (?)

David Ryckaert III (1612–1661) (style of)

Jan Davidsz. de Heem 's (1606–1683/1684) Memento Mori depicts a pair of nose glasses between cut flowers in their last gasp of vitality and an overturned skull. While its title refers to the older tradition of the memento mori , this painting is also reminiscent of the vanitas , popular with Dutch painters like de Heem in the seventeenth century.

Here the glasses could signify intellectual pursuits with the painting overall suggesting the folly of the search for knowledge in the face of inevitable and unpredictable death. But the skull is knocked over and the glasses are at the forefront of the image. Another reading is that it could be a subversion of this artistic tradition, suggesting instead that the legacy of great intellectual achievement is a way of cheating death.

Memento Mori 1630–1660

Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606–1683/1684)

Spectacles remained largely unchanged for almost 400 years until the 1700s, when a significant innovation came about (this shift was most likely thanks to the invention of newspapers). The arms or 'sides' were developed and the C-shape bridge became popular. By the nineteenth century, nose spectacles seemed a little outdated. It's not really any surprise that the age which saw the peak of dandyism also gave us some of the most elaborately designed glasses.

A Dandy 1838–1885

Émile Coriolan Hippolyte Guillemin (1841–1907) and Maison Alphonse Giroux, Paris (active 1799–1885)

José Buzo Cáceres '  Portrait of a Gentleman depicts a man wearing glasses with tinted side visors which were popular during the 1830s.

Portrait of a Gentleman 1839

José Buzo Cáceres (active 1830–1870)

Neil Handley comments on the obscuration of the gentleman's eyes, suggesting the prominence of the glasses could be to conceal something that might offend a viewer, such as the hallmarks of a disease or blindness.

As he says: 'Throughout history the sightless eye has often been covered by a patch or an occluded lens, to guard against our sensitivities and deflect prejudice, revulsion and social rejection.' But the unique style of these specs also suggests something of a fashion and status symbol.

Many of the connotations, both negative and positive, that glasses have acquired in their 700-year history persist today.  Portrait of an Intellectual by John Howard Jephcott (1910–1984) presents a take on the enduring association of spectacles and intellect that seems to hark back to the idea Eckermann related to Goethe: the delusion that the 'artificial eminence' which glasses afforded their wearers was authentic.

Portrait of an Intellectual 1959

John Howard Jephcott (1910–1984)

As in the Cáceres portrait, the figure's eyes are barely visible and even appear to be closed. The glasses seem to fade into the face as if part of his very skin – not a tool or accessory but part of his identity as a so-called intellectual.

The eyes are also barely visible in amateur artist and former miner Charles William Brown 's 1958 self-portrait Me, 76 . The glasses appear smeared and scratched, affected by the passage of time like the portrait's subject, and looking as though they would, in defiance of their purpose, obscure his vision rather than aid it.

Me, 76 1958

Charles William Brown (1882–1961)

In Dragon and Figure , by an unknown artist, the crude lines that make up the spectacles are what help distinguish the figure in the centre of the work as specifically human. Here, the glasses are not an indicator of class, age, or profession, but personhood and the ingenuity of an invention that embodies dissatisfaction (or conceitedness if you're Eckermann) with the limits of our bodies.

Dragon and Figure 1989

Due to twenty-first-century technological advancements, such as laser eye surgery, for many people, glasses are viewed as fashion accessories as much as they are medical aids. From a contemporary perspective, representations of glasses in fine art remind us of their perceived prestige in history, as well as our culture's ongoing spectacle stigma.

Aida Amoako, freelance writer

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The history of glasses

From their origins as "reading stones" to lifestyle accessories.

According to experts, glasses are the fifth most important invention since mankind discovered fire and invented the wheel. The reason: for the first time in human history, millions of people were able to enjoy good vision in spite of problems with their vision. Today we take this for granted, but for centuries there was simply no solution for those suffering from a visual impairment – glasses still had to be invented. It took a long time to develop the modern glasses we know today. This processes required a lot of experimentation, and many different types of glasses came and went. BETTER VISION recounts the history of glasses – from their beginnings as "reading stones" to their transformation into sought-after lifestyle and fashion accessories.

The invention of glasses is considered a crucial step forward in humanity's cultural history: suddenly, people suffering from visual impairments could not only play an active role in day-to-day life, but also study for longer, expand their knowledge and then pass it on to others. The great Roman orator Cicero (106-43 BCE) lamented how cumbersome it was to have slaves read texts aloud. Or take the special kind of visual device created by the emperor Nero (37-68 CE): he watched his beloved gladiator fights using a transparent green stone in the hope that the light would refresh his eyes. This belief persisted into the 19th century. "Sunglasses" from that period had green lenses and were also worn indoors. But when and where did the invention of a proper visual aid actually begin?

What glasses can do today

From precision varifocal lenses and special lenses for the digital world to driving glasses or spectacle lenses designed with contact lens wearers in mind: our goal to continually optimise people's vision has produced many innovative lens designs and solutions since the creation of Punktal ®   lenses.

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A History of the World in Six Glasses

Thomas standage.

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Thomas Standage's A History of the World in Six Glasses . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Six Glasses: Introduction

Six glasses: plot summary, six glasses: detailed summary & analysis, six glasses: themes, six glasses: quotes, six glasses: characters, six glasses: symbols, six glasses: theme wheel, brief biography of thomas standage.

Historical Context of A History of the World in Six Glasses

Other books related to a history of the world in six glasses.

• Full Title: A History of the World in Six Glasses
• Where Written: London, England
• When Published: June 2005
• Literary Period: Contemporary Non-fiction
• Genre: Creative Non-fiction, Historical Commentary
• Setting: Too many to name—the book travels across history and around the world, focusing on settings like ancient Greece, Victorian England, Enlightenment France, and feudal Japan.
• Climax: None: the book is structured as a collection of six essays, each of which deals with a different beverage and historical era.
• Antagonist: None
• Point of View: Third person omniscient

Extra Credit for A History of the World in Six Glasses

Tom Standage: an unofficial biography: At the age of six, Tom Standage’s daughter Ella wrote the following about her father: “My daddy’s name is tom. he tells me storys. He likes beer coffee and rum. he has bron hair and blue eyes. he has a nose that looks funny. he is 36 years old. he is great! he has big ears. he works in the Economist. he ritse books. he isent very good at gardening. he dose smelly farts. I love him.” Enough said.

Quite the “niche”: Tom Standage has spent most of his adult life exploring an unusual thesis: that the world hasn’t changed much since the Victorian era. While this might seem to be obviously untrue (all sorts of things we take for granted today, such as the Internet, the airplane, the radio, and the computer, didn’t exist 150 years ago), Standage’s point is that while much important technology has been invented since the Victorian era, there have been almost no improvements in the basic scientific breakthrough of that time: the discovery of the electric signal. As one might imagine, there aren’t many people who agree with Standage’s argument, and in recent years he has relished his status as a lone detractor against the glory of the Internet, writing pieces for The Economist and giving TED talks.

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Crystal-Clear Vision – The Ancient History of Eyeglasses

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Eyeglasses are an essential tool for thousands of people across the globe. Unfortunately, glasses didn’t always exist, which caused difficulties for those in the ancient past with poor vision. However, the Romans made significant steps towards the correction of vision problems when they discovered that different thicknesses of glass could cause changes in clarity when looking through them. Because of this discovery, eye health has advanced, first from glasses to contacts and now from eyewear to surgical options such as LASIK.

The road from the first creation of glasses to modern ophthalmology was a long one. In this article, we’re going to look into the past to see just how far glasses have come since the Romans. How did the Romans make this discovery in the first place, and how did they navigate crafting glasses for each unique person? And how long did this discovery take to spread across the globe?

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Blown Glass Lenses and Handcrafted Frames

The Romans were the first people on record to have created eyeglasses. Roman civilization discovered at some point in history that they could use certain types of glass to magnify objects. The earliest record of this is from Seneca, a Roman tragedian who lived between 4 BC and 65 AD, who reportedly used a glass globe full of water to magnify the text in his books. Decades later, we have evidence that Roman glassblowers were commissioned to make different types of glass spheres that could be used on text to make it larger and clearer to read. These glass spheres were traditionally used by monks in the Middle Ages so they could read religious texts more easily.

Reading stone in Archeon, a historical theme park in Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands. (Ziko van Dijk / CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Alongside the creation of these spheres, some individuals began embedding these spheres into frames that could be put over their eyes throughout Pisa, Venice, and Florence. Because each person’s vision is different, glassblowers began to experiment with producing spheres of different thickness to change their magnifying abilities. These magnifying lenses were inserted into frames made of animal horn, wood, or leather to be held in front of the face. Other styles were designed to be perched carefully on the nose.

Much of our knowledge about these developments in glasses comes from the observation of Renaissance paintings containing people using handheld or perch glasses. An example of this is Tommaso da Modena’s 1352 fresco cycle of 40 different Dominican scholars at their desks. One painting contains a man using a handheld magnifying glass, and another contains a man using a set of glasses perched atop his nose. It is believed that this is the earliest known painting depicting the use of true glasses.

Tommaso da Modena’s portrait of Hugh of Saint-Cher, 1352. (Risorto Celebrano / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Beyond handheld lenses and perched frames, these glass lenses were also sometimes inserted into leather straps or metal bands. These bands were then strapped around the back of the head to keep hands-free glasses more securely on the face. As more pairs were being made, the craftsmanship improved, with lenses and frames becoming thinner, lighter, and more comfortable over time. As glasses became more popular, early optometrists would work with glassblowers to help customize lenses to fit patients’ specific vision needs. However, these customized glasses were typically quite expensive because of the time and effort involved to create them, so customized glasses were normally reserved for the wealthy.

Interestingly, there is no evidence of women using these early pairs of glasses. Because lenses at the time were used to magnify rather than to clarify, most of the glasses produced were for farsighted individuals so they could read. Since women were not permitted to be literate during this time, they had no societal need for glasses. Even after women became more literate, the cost of glasses was still so expensive that only religious scholars, political leaders, or other wealthy individuals used them.

An Age of Advancement and Convenience

Spanish craftsmen in the 17th century discovered these glasses and decided to use string to tie perch glasses to their ears rather than deal with the discomfort of leather or metal bands. Spanish and Italian missionaries brought many of these glasses with them during their missionary trips, which led to their introduction in China and surrounding countries in Asia. It is believed that while the Chinese had their own form of vision-correcting spectacles, they took this string idea and instead tied weights to the strings so they could be draped over the wearer’s ears and stay on. This was simply one of many early developments of glasses outside of Europe.

The next advancements in European glasses after their early development by the Romans occurred in England in the 18th century. Benjamin Martin, a famous eyeglass manufacturer, was the first individual to create eyeglasses that perch on the nose and sit over the ears. These spectacles were called “Martin’s Margins,” and are still incredibly famous with collectors today. They were designed with perfectly round lenses with black rims designed to protect wearers from light damage and decrease glare. Most of the frames are made from either silver or steel, with the black rims being made of either horn or tortoiseshell.

Martin’s Margins by an unknown maker; 1750-1890. ( CC BY NC )

It is believed that around this time, glasswork had advanced to differentiate between concave and convex lenses. This led to improvements in glasses for near-sighted people to be able to see at a distance. In 1784, Benjamin Franklin redesigned glasses to take into consideration people who could not see at a distance nor close enough to read easily. This redesign was the birth of bifocals. These lenses were concave on top for near-sightedness and convex on the bottom for presbyopia. In 1825, Sir George Airy created cylindrical lenses to correct astigmatism.

Other developments were made as the Industrial Revolution rolled in in the 19th century. “Scissor Spectacles” were designed to fold up like scissors and be carried in your pocket if you didn’t want to wear them all the time. Though glasses were previously handcrafted and too expensive for anyone but the elite, industrialism brought about mass production of eyeglass frames and lenses, which made glasses available to average working men and women.

French empire gilt scissors-glasses c. 1805. ( Public domain )

The Future: Crystal Clear

With mass production becoming the norm, society was able to start looking at other factors such as making glasses fashionable. New frame and lens shapes were produced as well as different frame colors. Using plastic to produce frames opened up more opportunities for various color and shape combinations. Nose-perch glasses attempted to make a comeback in the form of pince-nez glasses, which used a clip to pinch to the bridge of the nose. These glasses were famously worn by President Theodore Roosevelt, but lost popularity with future generations.

Photo of hard bridge pince nez glasses with chain and earhook. (350z33 / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

To compete with other styles, some glasses manufacturers began producing glasses with different lens colors. This led into the development of sunglasses, which were originally invented in China in the 12th century. Original sunglasses were not designed to protect the eyes from the sun, but rather to hide the emotions of Chinese officials using lenses made of quartz. These ideas collided in the early 1900s to produce tinted lenses that were able to protect the eyes of individuals with medical conditions such as light sensitivity. Years later, they were more than a medical intervention and preventative form of eye protection – sunglasses became a fashion statement.

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In the 1980s, glass lenses were replaced by plastic lenses due to their ability to make glasses more lightweight. They were also less breakable and could be made thinner, so they were more comfortable to wear. Nowadays, eyeglasses are advancing with protective coatings added to the lenses to protect against UV light, computer screens, and glare. In the future, we will likely see more advancements in eye protection and vision correction, such as improved contact lenses and eye surgeries such as LASIK. However our vision continues being fixed, the coming years are sure to be crystal clear.

Top image: Discover the fascinating history of eyeglasses. Source: Fxquadro / Adobe Stock

By Lex Leigh

All About Eyes. (2021, June 24). See into the past: The fascinating history of eyeglasses . All About Eyes. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://allabouteyes.com/see-past-fascinating-history-eyeglasses/

The earliest depiction of eyeglasses in a painted work of art . The Earliest Depiction of Eyeglasses in a Painted Work of Art: History of Information. (n.d.). Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=1755

History of eyeglasses and sunglasses . Eyeglasses History - Origins of Glasses and Sunglasses. (n.d.). Retrieved May 6, 2022, from http://www.glasseshistory.com/

The history of eyeglasses . Atlantic Eye Institute. (2021, October 28). Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://atlanticeyeinstitute.com/the-history-of-eyeglasses/

Ilardi, V. (2018, November 20). Eyeglasses and concave lenses in fifteenth-century Florence and Milan: New documents*: Renaissance Quarterly . Cambridge Core. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renaissance-quarterly/article/abs/eyeglasses-and-concave-lenses-in-fifteenthcentury-florence-and-milan-new-documents/4232170036589FEED6441FEAE5EC17E6

Letocha, C. D. (2002, November 1). Early prints depicting eyeglasses . Archives of Ophthalmology. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullarticle/272834

Spectacles . National Museum of American History. (n.d.). Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1058664#:~:text=These%20silver%2Dframed%20eyeglasses%20with,light%20and%20improve%20their%20vision

As a miopic person myself and interested in all sorts of history I find the history of glasses that you descide from glass placed on a page to magnify to actual glasses fascinating. What I find equally interesting is the idea that shortsightedness cannot be hereditary as in early cultures it would be have been evolved out (can’t see the mammoth, can’t spear the mammoth) but that it is a result of lack of exposure to daylight.  

Lex Leigh is a former educator with several years of writing experience under her belt. She earned her BS in Microbiology with a minor in Psychology. Soon after this, she earned her MS in Education and worked as a secondary... Read More