“You will ruin your eyes, Henrietta, in such bad light,” her mother warns. And she’s right! Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.

Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End, via Erasing

All of my reading life, I have preferred to curl up somewhere rather dim to work. I loathe overhead lights, choosing instead to fill my study with lamps. But my real preference is for no artificial light at all. Every childhood weekend spent at Grandma’s was filled with admonitions that I would ruin my eyes.

And I have. I began reading at two, and the optometrist started noticing problems by the time I was six or seven. I got contacts at 13, bifocals at 20, reading glasses to wear with the contacts at 23. Now I’m at 4.25/3.50 contacts plus reading glasses plus artificial tears. (The dryness is a product of the drier Minnesota climate added to already heavy computer use.) Cataracts run on my mother’s side of the family.

I do my best to be diligent these days, wearing the reading glasses and putting in the drops. But the afternoon before last I could not resist stretching out in the bedroom to read. I had opened both window shades to let in the light and a view of the falling show. The afternoon light these days is a deep blue that fades by four, but I could not bear to turn on the lights, and the reading glasses obscured my view of the snow. Reading Kant and the Playtpus in the blue light, there was a specter behind my left shoulder whispering, You’ll ruin your eyes. There’s not much to spare. Still, I lingered as long as I could before I lit the lamps, because there was so much beautiful gloaming seeping through the panes.