THE NAME I´M SAYING NOW (ANTONIO SOLER), THE TRANSLUCENT BELL JAR (ANDRÉS TRAPIELLO) AND A GOOD METAPHOR ABOUT SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS

 With the first ones I saw worse; distant things also got bent, and with the second ones, it was the same. With others I just saw  blurred,  hazy things, and so I kept trying while Montoya would open drawers and look at paintings without being quiet; and I would see him sometimes very far away, other times with his head in a place and his body elsewhere, or submerged in water. And suddenly, when I put on one of those glasses and opened my eyes, I saw everything different, Montoyas´face, the painting he was looking at and the glasses Hidalgo had in his hands, and it was really like everything had been removed from the bottom of the sea, and I was afraid because it seemed as if I emerged from some place where I had always been  hidden and now I was out of my hideout, exposed. I was told that on putting on the glasses, my eyes were wide open, they became bigger and my pupils seemed to almost touch the lenses. That was what they told me, and that was what I thought on looking at myself in a mirror, that my eyes were some fish stuck to the glass of their fish bowl staring at the world

The Name I´m Saying Now, Antonio Soler

Albano was a skinny, small-framed, and short-sighted man, thus endowed with very big glasses which exaggeratedly enlarged his eyes. Those enormous eyes observed the word with veiled astonishment. He looked through the spectacles just like a red sea bream would from inside its aquarium; and he moved in this world like one of those taciturn fish that swims around in circles all day without knowing what  they are after, woolgathering

The Translucent Bell Jar, Andrés Trapiello

As a person with deep myopia, I think it´s a right analogy;   you  see as if you were underwater. To be honest, I can´t check wether this is true, because I haven´t opened my eyes under the water for ages just because  my contacts would fall off.

The refraction index of vitreous humour is very similar to that of the water , but different from the one of the air, where our outlook is necessarily more frequent  

T

NUNS AND SOLDIERS (IRIS MURDOCH) AND A PARAGRAPH WITH A MISHMASH FULL OF SCIENTIFIC JARGON

He felt extremely quiet, but absolutely stretched as if space were bending and he were bending with it. Everything seemed to vanish including his own personality. He was a tiny scrap of being, a particle, and yet also he was the surrounding area which seemed infinite. He was an atom, an electron, a proton, a point in empty space. He was transparent. It was this transparency which made him feel invisible. He was empty, he was clean, he was nothing. Yet at the same time he was refined energy, pure activity, pure being. The experience was not in itself painful, though frightful pain somehow existed too, nearby, half hidden, sometimes like a black hole, sometimes like a dense mass of indestructible matter.

Iris Murdoch isn´t very prone to introduce scientific matters in her novels, she is more into Philosophy. But she has loosen up here: protons, electrons, black holes, atoms…they are all welcome so we can bring this author to our blog.