瞳孔が開いている

瞳孔が開いている

少し古い話になる。
私が5歳になったばかりの頃だ。明るい時間に父と話していたから、その日は日曜日だったはずだ。電子基板の設計事務所を営む実家の1 階は父の仕事場になっており、Windows95 も発売されていない当時はまだ本体の大きかったコンピューターが所狭しと並んでいた。私は図面台の前にある回転椅子に座って不用意にクルクルまわったり、大きなライトボックスの蛍光灯を点灯させたり、要らなくなったコピー用紙で紙飛行機を作ったり、事務所の奥にある現像室に入って完全な暗闇を感じてみたり、何も映っていない凸型に湾曲したガラスのコンピューター・ディスプレイの前に立ち、それら機械の排気口から室内に放たれる独特な匂いを感じたりして過ごしていた。

会社の入り口に立った父は軽い気持ちで「おまえも一緒に行くか?」と自分の眼鏡を新調するために私を誘ってきた。最寄りのごく一般的なチェーン店の眼鏡屋につくと、父は自分の検査を終えて暇だったのか──お店も空いていたのだろう──私も検査することになった。ひと通り検査を終えたあと、店員が私を残して(少し申し訳なさそうにしているように私には感じられた)父と母を奥のほうへと連れて行った。
かくして自分が極度の遠視と乱視だったことを知り、その後に視力を矯正するために何度も大学病院に通い、より精密な検査を行うために、瞳孔を完全に開くためのアトロピン液を点眼することになった。もしそのまま放置していたら眼球の筋肉が弱って弱視になっていたというから、今とは少し違った人生だったかもしれない。
数週間後、自分にとって初めての眼鏡をかけて壁にかかっていたものを最初に目にしたときの記憶が鮮明に残っている。それはごく普通の壁掛け時計だった。

世界には輪郭があり、細部がある。

私がそれまで見ていたものは全てあやふやだった。あらゆるものに輪郭がなかった。近くのものも見えなければ、遠くのものも見えず、なんとなくその人の雰囲気や、空気みたいなものを感じ取って生活していた。それが日常だった。
眼鏡を手に入れる前も後も、私は粘土でよく遊び、絵を描いた。それは世界をより正確に認識するための行為だった。だが触るものと見えてい
るものが本当に同一のものと認識したことはこれまで一度もない。

私はいまもあの一瞬で日常が変わってしまうような体験を求めている。

須賀 悠介

Eyes for wide shut

This story is a little old.
It goes back to just after I turned four years old. I was talking with my father when it was light outside, so it must have be en a Sunday. My father’ s workplace was the whole first floor of our house, which was occupied by the electronic circuit board design office that he ran. At the time, even Windows 95 had not yet been released, and the place was filled with computers that were still fairly large. In the office, I spent my time doing things such as spinning around aimlessly on the rotating chair in front of the drawing table, turning on the fluorescent lamp in the big light box, making paper airplane s with scrap copy machine paper, going into the darkroom in the rear of the office to experience complete blackness, standing in front o f the convex-curve glass of blank computer displays, and smelling the
peculiar odor emitted by the outlets of these machines into the air inside the office.

“Do you want to come too?” my father casually asked as he stood in the entrance of the office. He was inviting me to go with him to have a new pair of glasses made. We went to an optician that was the nearest location of a popular chain store. Perhaps because he had to wait a while after his own vision measurement and there were few other customers, he had my vision measured as well. After performing the usual test, the optician took my father and moth er to the rear, leaving me in the chair (and feeling a little sorry for me, I felt).

This is how I learned that I was extremely farsighted and had a stigmatic vision. I subsequently went to a university hospital several times for more precise examinations in order to correct my vision. In these examinations, the doctor put drops of atropine int o my eyes to completely dilate the pupils. If nothing had been done, my eyeball muscles would have become enfeebled and made me weak-sighted. As a result, my life may have differed slightly f rom what it is today.
A few weeks later, I received my first-ever pair of glasses. I have a vivid memory of when I first looked at an object hanging on the wall while wearing them. The object was an ordinary clock.

In this world, there are outlines and details.

Up until then, everything I had seen was fuzzy. Nothing of any sort had had an outline. I could not clearly see things nearby or far away. I had lived by somehow sensing a person’ s atmosphere or something like the air. That was my normal.

Both before and after getting the glasses, I often played with clay and drew pictures. They were my way of getting a more correct perception of the world. Right up to the present, however, I have never once perceived what I touched and what I could see as really being identical.

Even today, I am looking for that experience of my everyday world changing in an instant.

Yusuke Suga