Print seems grey and blurred when the hyperope looks at it. This state of things can be improved indirectly by a constant practice of the fundamental procedures of the art of seeing—palming, sunning, swinging and shifting; and, directly, through memory and imagination. The hyperope should look at one of the large numerals on his calendar and then, with closed eyes, “letting go” remember the intense blackness of the ink and reflect at the same time that exactly the same ink is used for printing the small letters, which he sees as grey and misty. Next, calling imagination into play, he should remember one of these smaller letters, imagine a blacker dot at its base and another at the top. After shifting from dot to dot with the inward eye, he should look at the real letter and do the same on that. It will soon blacken and, for a few seconds, he will be able to see it and the other letters on the page quite distinctly. Then all will blur again, and he will have to repeat his acts of memory and imagination.
After paying attention for a little to the blackness of the letters, he should consider the whiteness of the background within and around the letters, and should exercise himself in first imagining and then, with the aid of the imagination, actually seeing it whiter than it is in reality. The vision for reading and other close work may be markedly improved in this way. This is not surprising; for between the eyes and the mind there exists a two-way connection. A mental strain will cause strain and physical distortion in the eyes; and physical distortion in the eyes will cause the mind to perceive an imperfect image of the external object, and so increase its strain. But, conversely, if the mind is able, through memory and imagination, to form within itself a perfect image of an external object, the existence of this perfect image in the mind will automatically improve the condition of the strained and distorted eyes. The more perfect the image in the mind, the greater the improvement in the physical condition of the eyes.
For the eyes will tend to assume the physical conformation, which eyes must have, if they are to transmit the sort of sensa that a mind can perceive in terms of a perfect image of an external object. Not only is the connection between eyes and mind a reversible, two-way connection; it is also a connection for mutual benefit as well as for mutual harm. This is a very important fact to remember; for we tend, for some curious reason, to think only of the mischief that the eyes can inflict upon the mind and the mind upon the eyes—of blurred vision, due to strain and refractive error, and of visual delusions produced by the imagination, of temporary failures of vision caused by sudden outbursts of rage or grief, and of diseases of the eyes brought on by chronic negative emotion. But if eyes and mind can harm, they can also help one another.
An unstrained mind has undistorted eyes, and undistorted eyes do their work so well that they never add anything to the burdens of the mind. Moreover, when, through mental strain or for some other reason, a distortion of the eyes has been produced, the mind can help to remedy this distortion by doing the right, the beneficial thing at its end of the two-way communication line. It can perform acts of remembering, which are always accompanied by the condition of relaxation that permits the eyes to return to their normal shape and normal functioning. And it can call up, by imagination, representations of external objects more perfect than those it ordinarily sees on the basis of the poor sensa transmitted by the distorted eyes. But when the mind has a perfectly clear image of an object, the eyes tend automatically to revert to the condition which would enable them to furnish the proper raw materials for making such an image.
Just as the emotions and their outward physical expression (in the form of gesture, metabolic change, glandular activity and so forth) are indissolubly connected, so too there is an indissoluble connection, for good as well as for evil, between the visual image, whether produced by memory, imagination or the interpretation of sensa, and the physical condition of the eyes. Impair or improve the mental image, and you automatically impair or improve the condition of the eyes. By means of repeated acts of memory and imagination it is possible to improve, temporarily at first, then permanently, the quality of the mental images of external objects. When this has been achieved, there is first a temporary, then a permanent improvement in the physical condition of the eyes. Hence the value of memory and imagination drills in conditions, such as hyperopia, in which sensa and the perceptions based upon them are of poor quality.
Exercises which compel the mind and eyes to change their focus rapidly from distance to the near point are as useful to the hyperope as to the myope. Such drills have already been described in the chapter on short sight.
Presbyopia is essentially an inability to accommodate the eyes, so that they will do clear and accurate sensing at the near point. This failure to accommodate seems to be the result of a habit, to the building up of which middle-aged and elderly people are predisposed by the hardening of the lens. This habit can, as experience shows, be modified, even though the physical condition of the lens may remain, as it presumably does, unchanged. Like all other sufferers from defects of vision, presbyopes should follow the fundamental rules of the art of seeing, adapting them to their own particular needs and, where necessary, supplementing them. To the procedures which are helpful to all long-sighted persons, they should add the following techniques for improving their reading.
Print can be read without undue strain somewhat nearer to the eyes than the point of maximum comfort and habitual usage. The presbyope can coax his eyes and mind to get used to seeing at this nearer point, provided always that he interrupts his reading to keep the visual organs relaxed by means of palming, swinging and sunning. Little by little, the reading distance can be considerably shortened in this way, while the eyes and mind acquire a renewal of flexibility.
Oliver Wendell Holmes records the case of an old gentleman of his acquaintance who, “perceiving his sight to fail, immediately took to exercising it on the finest print, and in this way fairly bullied nature out of her foolish habit of taking liberties at five-and-forty, or thereabout. And now the old gentleman performs the most extraordinary feats with his pen, showing that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes. I should be afraid to say how much he writes on the compass of a half-dime—whether the Psalms or the Gospels, or the Psalms and the Gospels, I won’t be positive.”
This old gentleman had evidently discovered for himself what Dr. Bates was later to re-discover and proclaim to the world—the value, for people with defective sight, of very small and even microscopic print. Oliver Wendell Holmes is wrong, however, in saying that he “fairly bullies nature out of her habit” of giving people presbyopia. The sensing eyes and the perceiving mind cannot successfully be bullied. Any attempt to force them to sense and perceive always results, within a very short time, not in the improvement of vision, but its impairment. The old gentleman who trained his eyes to become a pair of microscopes, cannot possibly have bullied; he must have coaxed them. And provided they do the same, all presbyopes may profitably follow his example.
Procure a specimen of very small print. (In any second-hand bookshop you may find thick little duodecimos of the early nineteenth century, containing the complete works of the great and the forgotten, and printed in a diamond type so small that our ancestors must indeed have had good vision to get through whole volumes of it.) Take the sunlight on the closed eyes, or, if there is no sun, bathe them in the light of a strong electric lamp. Palm for a few minutes, and then give the closed eyes a few more seconds of light. Thus relaxed, you can set to work on your small print. Holding the page either in full sunlight, or in the best possible substitute for sunlight, look at it easily, effortlessly, breathing and blinking as you do so. Make no attempt to see the words, but let the eyes wander back and forth along the white spaces between the lines of print.
No mental hazards are involved in looking at a plain surface; consequently, there will be no temptation to strain, if you keep the eyes and attention shifting on the white spaces between the lines. From far out, move the page to within a foot of the eyes, still paying attention to the white spaces rather than the print, and still taking care to breathe and blink, so as to prevent the attention from becoming unduly fixed and immobile. (By changing the outward expression of an undesirable mental state, one acts upon the mental state itself. Attention cannot be misdirected, if we take pains to correct the external symptoms of misdirected attention.) Interrupt this procedure at frequent intervals to palm and take the sun. This is essential; for, as we have seen, there can be no bullying of the sensing eyes and
