Lenses

I have horrible vision, and I've had quite the experience when it comes to switching between various optical lenses. Without my corrected vision, I would've been squinting at the world trying to focus on the one big thing that stood out to me without catching all the minor details that supported it.

Last year in English, I read a queer lens on The Great Gatsby. While reading the book, I remembered having some questions, but they never had a definitive answer, so I eventually forgot about them. I picked the queer lens having absolutely no idea how it was going to work, but the perspective I chose to read miraculously answered and cleared up all those questions I had before. Revisiting these lenses now and applying them to stories we've read ourselves reminded me of how I was so astonished reading through a focused point of view. 

Being able to wear different lenses to improve my vision allows me to now understand the big picture but with all the supporting details that go into it. I've been through quite the optical journey: going from glasses to day contacts (trying both monthly and daily) and finally to the current night contacts I have now. 

As I moved and switch from one to the other, my perception of the world got better along with it because I could now look into different perspectives with a clearer understanding of the overlying idea. Like literary lenses, jumping into these different kinds of unexplored viewpoints make us more attentive to detail and reach greater conclusions about the work as we piece it all together.

Rather than being correctors, these lenses are moreso vision improvers that meant to clear up the blurry parts of the world in order to bring out the unanswered or overlooked parts that weren't seen before. Once the situation is grasped well enough, taking one particular view to reanalyze the situation and smaller parts can reveal so much more compared to reading it through the first time to understand the plot. Only after multiple rereads do we finally uncover the small details that were missed initially and are now used to strengthen our perspective. As all say, it's like seeing a "whole new world."