hey are all common gestures: pulling the glasses out of a case, cleaning them with a tissue or the hem of the blouse or the tip of the tie, perching them on the nose and steadying them behind the ears before peering at the now lucid page held in front of us. Then pushing them up or sliding them down the glistening bridge of the nose in order to bring the letters into focus and, after a while, lifting them off and rubbing the skin between the eyebrows, screwing the eyelids shut to keep out the siren text. And the final act: taking them off, folding them and inserting them between the pages of the book to mark the place where we left off reading for the night. In Christian iconography, Saint Lucy is represented carrying a pair of eyes on a tray; glasses are, in effect, eyes that poor-sighted readers can pull off and put on at will. They are a detachable function of a body, a mask through which the world can be observed, an insect-like creature carried along like a pet praying mantis. Unobtrusive, sitting cross-legged on a pile of books or standing expectantly in a cluttered corner of a desk, they have become the reader’s emblem, a mark of the reader’s presence, a symbol of the reader’s craft.
It is bewildering to imagine the many centuries before the invention of glasses, during which readers squinted their way through the nebulous outlines of a text, and moving to imagine their extraordinary relief, once glasses were available, at suddenly seeing, almost without effort, a page of writing. A sixth of all humankind is myopic;1 among readers the proportion is much higher, closer to 24 per cent. Aristotle, Luther, Samuel Pepys, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Schiller, Keats, Tennyson, Dr. Johnson, Alexander Pope, Quevedo, Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Kipling, Edward Lear, Dorothy L. Sayers, Yeats, Unamuno, Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce — all had impaired sight. In many people the condition deteriorates, and a remarkable number of famous readers have gone blind in their old age, from Homer to Milton, and on to James Thurber and Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, who began losing his sight in the early thirties and was appointed head of the Buenos Aires National Library in 1955, when he could no longer see, commented on the peculiar fate of the failing reader who is one day granted the realm of books:
Let no one demean to tears or reproach
This declaration of the skill of God
Who with such magnificent irony
Gave me at the same time darkness and the books.2
Borges compared the fate of this reader in the blurred world of “pale vague ashes resembling oblivion and sleep” to the fate of King Midas, condemned to die of hunger and thirst surrounded by food and drink. An episode of the television series The Twilight Zone concerns one such Midas, a voracious reader who alone of all mankind survives a nuclear disaster. All the books in the world are now at his disposal; then, accidentally, he breaks his glasses.
Before the invention of glasses, at least a quarter of all readers would have required extra-large letters to decipher a text. The strain on the eyes of medieval readers was great: the rooms in which they tried to read were darkened in summer to protect them from the heat; in winter the rooms were naturally dark because the windows, necessarily small to keep out the icy drafts, let in only a dusty light. Medieval scribes constantly complained about the conditions in which they had to work, and often scribbled notes about their troubles in the margins of their books, like the one penned in the mid-thirteenth century by a certain Florencio of whom we know virtually nothing except his first name and this mournful description of his craft: “It is a painful task. It extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body.”3 For poor-sighted readers the work must have been even harder; Patrick Trevor-Roper suggested that they likely felt somewhat more comfortable at night “because darkness is a great equalizer”.4
In Babylon and Rome and Greece, readers whose sight was poor had no other resource than to have their books read to them, usually by slaves. A few found that looking through a disk of clear stone helped. Writing about the properties of emeralds,5 Pliny the Elder noted in passing that the short-sighted Emperor Nero used to watch gladiator combats through an emerald. Whether this magnified the gory details or simply gave them a greenish hue we can’t tell, but the story persisted throughout the Middle Ages and scholars such as Roger Bacon and his teacher, Robert Grosseteste, commented on the jewel’s remarkable property.
But few readers had access to precious stones. Most were condemned to live out their reading hours depending on vicarious reading, or on a slow and painstaking progress as the muscles of their eyes strained to remedy the defect. Then, sometime in the late thirteenth century, the fate of the poor-sighted reader changed.
We don’t know exactly when the change happened, but on February 23, 1306, from the pulpit of the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Giordano da Rivalto of Pisa delivered a sermon in which he reminded his flock that the invention of eyeglasses, “one of the most useful devices in the world”, was already twenty years old. He added, “I’ve seen the man who, before anyone else, discovered and made a pair of glasses, and I spoke to him.”6
Nothing is known of this remarkable inventor. Perhaps he was a contemporary of Giordano, a monk named Spina of whom it was said that “he made glasses and freely taught the art to others”.7 Perhaps he was a member of the Guild of Venetian Crystal Workers, where the craft of eyeglass-making was known as early as 1301, since one of the guild’s rules that year explained the procedure to be followed by anyone “wishing to make eyeglasses for reading”.8 Or perhaps the inventor was a certain Salvino degli Armati, whom a funeral plaque still visible in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence calls “inventor of eyeglasses” and adds, “May God forgive his sins. A.D. 1317”. Another candidate is Roger Bacon, whom we have already encountered as master cataloguer and whom Kipling, in a late story, made witness to the use of an early Arab microscope smuggled into England by an illuminator.9 In the year 1268, Bacon had written, “If anyone examines letters or small objects through the medium of a crystal or glass if it be shaped like the lesser segment of a sphere, with all the convex side towards the eye, he will see the letters far better and larger. Such an instrument is useful to all persons.”10 Four centuries later, Descartes was still praising the invention of glasses: “All the management of our lives depends on the senses, and since that of sight is the most comprehensive and the noblest of these, there is no doubt that inventions that serve to augment its power are among the most useful there can be.”11
The earliest known depiction of eyeglasses is in a 1352 portrait of Cardinal Hugo de St. Cher, in Provence, by Tommaso da Modena.12 It shows the cardinal in full costume, seated at his table, copying from an open book on a shelf slightly above him, to his right. The glasses, known as “rivet spectacles”, consist of two round lenses held in thick frames and hinged above the bridge of the nose, so that the grip can be regulated.
Until well into the fifteenth century, reading-glasses were a luxury; they were expensive, and comparatively few people needed them, since books themselves were in the possession of a select few. After the invention of the printing press and the relative popularization of books, the demand for eyeglasses increased; in England, for instance, pedlars travelling from town to town sold “cheap continental spectacles”. Makers of spectacles and clips became known in Strasbourg in 1466, barely eleven years after the publication of Gutenberg’s first Bible; in Nuremberg in 1478; and in Frankfurt in 1540.13 It is possible that more and better glasses allowed more readers to become better readers, and to buy more books, and that for this reason glasses became associated with the intellectual, the librarian, the scholar.
The first painted depiction of eyeglasses, on the nose of Cardinal Hugo de Saint Cher, painted by Tommaso da Modena in 1352. (photo credit 21.1)
From the fourteenth century on, glasses were added to numerous paintings, to mark the studious and wise nature of a character. In many depictions of the Dormition or Death of the Virgin, several of the doctors and wise men surrounding her death-bed found themselves wearing eyeglasses of various kinds; in the anonymous eleventh-century Dormition now at the Neuberg Monastery in Vienna, a pair of glasses was added several centuries later to a white-bearded sage being shown a hefty volume by a disconsolate younger man. The implication seems to be that even the wisest among scholars do not possess sufficient wisdom to heal the Virgin and change her destiny.
An eleventh-century Dormition of the Virgin in Neuberg Monastery, Vienna. Second from the right, one of the doctors attending her is wearing a pair of scholarly glasses added more than three centuries later to lend him authority. (photo credit 21.2)
In Greece, Rome and Byzantium, the scholar-poet — the doctus poeta, represented as holding a tablet or a scroll — had been considered a paragon, but this role was confined to mortals. The gods never busied themselves with literature; Greek and Latin divinities were never shown holding a book.14 Christianity was the first religion to place a book in the hands of its god, and from the mid-fourteenth century onwards the emblematic Christian book was accompanied by another image, that of the eyeglasses. The perfection of Christ and of God the Father would not justify their representation as short-sighted, but the Fathers of the Church — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine — and the ancient authors admitted into the Catholic canon — Cicero, Aristotle — were at times depicted carrying a learned tome and wearing the sage spectacles of knowledge.
By the end of the fifteenth century, eyeglasses were sufficiently familiar to symbolize not only the prestige of reading but also its abuses. Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible. I remember being laughed at, during one recess in grade six or seven, for staying indoors and reading, and how the taunting ended with me sprawled face down on the floor, my glasses kicked into one corner, my book into another. “You wouldn’t enjoy it” was the verdict of my cousins who, having seen my book-lined bedroom, assumed that I would not want to accompany them to see yet another Western. My grandmother, seeing me read on Sunday afternoons, would sigh, “You’re day-dreaming,” because my inactivity seemed to her a wasteful idleness and a sin against the joy of living. Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist — these are some of the epithets that eventually became associated with the absent-minded scholar, the poor-sighted reader, the bookworm, the nerd. Buried in books, isolated from the world of facts and flesh, feeling superior to those unfamiliar with the words preserved between dusty covers, the bespectacled reader who pretended to know what God in His wisdom had hidden was seen as a fool, and glasses became emblematic of intellectual arrogance.
In February 1494, during the famous Carnival of Basel, the young doctor of law Sebastian Brant published a small volume of allegorical verse in German entitled Das Narrenschiff, or The Ship of Fools. Its success was immediate: in the first year the book was reprinted three times and in Strasbourg, Brant’s birthplace, an enterprising publisher, anxious to share in the profits, commissioned an unknown poet to increase the book by four thousand lines. Brant complained about this form of plagiarism, but in vain. Two years later, Brant asked his friend Jacques Locher, professor of poetry at the University of Freiburg, to translate the book into Latin.15 Locher did so, but rearranged the order of the chapters and included variations of his own. Whatever the changes to Brant’s original text, the book’s readership kept increasing until well into the seventeenth century. Its success was partly due to the accompanying woodcuts, many by the hand of the twenty-two-year-old Albrecht Dürer. But largely the merit was Brant’s own. Brant had meticulously surveyed the follies or sins of his society, from adultery and gambling to lack of faith and ingratitude, in precise, up-to-date terms: for instance, the discovery of the New World, which had taken place less than two years earlier, is mentioned halfway through the book to exemplify the follies of covetous curiosity. Dürer and other artists offered Brant’s readers common images of these new sinners, recognizable at once among their peers in everyday life, but it was Brant himself who roughed out the illustrations intended as accompaniments to his text.
One of these images, the first after the frontispiece, illustrates the folly of the scholar. The reader opening Brant’s book would be confronted by his own image: a man in his study, surrounded by books. There are books everywhere: on the shelves behind him, on both sides of his lectern-desk, inside the compartments of the desk itself. The man is wearing a nightcap (to hide his ass’s ears) while a fool’s hood with bells hangs behind him, and he holds in his right hand a duster with which he swats at the flies come to settle on his books. He is the Büchernarr, the “book fool”, the man whose folly consists in burying himself in books. On his nose sits a pair of glasses.
These glasses accuse him: here is a man who will not see the world directly, but relies instead on peering at the dead words on a printed page. “It is for a very good reason,” says Brant’s foolish reader, “that I’m the first to climb into the ship. For me the book is everything, more precious even than gold. / I have great treasures here, of which I understand not a word.” He confesses that, in the company of learned men who quote from wise books, he loves to be able to say, “I have all those volumes at home”; he compares himself to Ptolemy II of Alexandria, who accumulated books but not knowledge.16 Through Brant’s book, the image of the bespectacled and foolish scholar quickly became a common icon; as early as 1505, in the De fide concubinarum of Olearius, an ass is sitting at an identical desk, glasses on his nose and fly-swatter in his hoof, reading from a big open book to a class of student-beasts.
So popular was Brant’s book that in 1509 the humanist scholar Geiler von Kaysersberg began preaching a series of sermons based on Brant’s cast of fools, one for every Sunday.17 The first sermon, corresponding to the first chapter of Brant’s book, was of course on the Book Fool. Brant had lent the fool words to describe himself; Geiler used the description to divide this bookish folly into seven types, each recognizable by the tinkling of one of the Fool’s bells. According to Geiler, the first bell announces the Fool who collects books for the sake of glory, as if they were costly furniture. In the first century AD, the Latin philosopher Seneca (whom Geiler liked to quote) had already denounced the ostentatious accumulation of books: “Many people without a school education use books not as tools for study but as decorations for the dining-room.”18 Geiler insists, “He who wants books to bring him fame must learn something from them; he must store them not in his library but in his head. But this first Fool has put his books in chains and made them his prisoners; could they free themselves and speak, they would haul him in front of the magistrate, demanding that he, not they, be locked up.” The second bell rings in the Fool who wants to grow wise through the consumption of too many books. Geiler compares him to a stomach upset by too much food, and to a military general hampered in his siege by having too many soldiers. “What should I do? you ask. Should I throw all my books away then?” — and we can imagine Geiler pointing his finger at one particular parishioner in his Sunday audience. “No, that you should not. But you should select those that are useful to you, and make use of them at the right moment.” The third bell rings in the Fool who collects books without truly reading them, merely flicking through them to satisfy his idle curiosity. Geiler compares him to a madman running through the town, trying to observe in detail, as he tears along, the signs and emblems on the house-fronts. This, he says, is impossible, and a sorry waste of time.
Albrecht Dürer’s frontispiece for Sebastian Brant’s first edition of The Ship of Fools. (photo credit 21.3)
Armed with a lectern, a book, a bundle of birches and a pair of glasses, an ass teaches a class of beasts in Olearius’s satirical De fide concubinarum of 1505. (photo credit 21.4)
The fourth bell calls the Fool who loves sumptuously illuminated books. “Is it not a sinful folly,” asks Geiler, “to feast one’s eyes on gold and silver when so many of God’s children go hungry? Don’t your eyes have the sun, the moon, the stars, the many flowers and other things to please you?” What need do we have for human figures or flowers in a book? Are not the ones God provided enough? And Geiler concludes that this love of painted images “is an insult to wisdom.” The fifth bell announces the Fool who binds his books in rich cloth. (Here again Geiler borrows silently from Seneca, who protested against the collector “who gets his pleasure from bindings and labels” and in whose illiterate household “you can see the complete works of orators and historians on shelves up to the ceiling, because, like bathrooms, a library has become an essential ornament of a rich house.”)19 The sixth bell calls in the Fool who writes and produces badly written books without having read the classics, and without any knowledge of spelling, grammar or rhetoric. He is the reader turned writer, tempted to add his scribbled thoughts to stand beside the works of the great. Finally — in a paradoxical switch future anti-intellectuals would ignore — the seventh and last Book Fool is he who despises books entirely and scorns the wisdom that can be obtained from them.
Through Brant’s intellectual imagery, Geiler, the intellectual, provided arguments for the anti-intellectuals of his time who lived uncertainly in an age that saw the civil and religious structures of European society split through dynastic wars that altered their concept of history, geographical explorations that shifted their concepts of space and of commerce, religious schisms that changed for ever their concept of who and why and what they were on earth. Geiler armed them with a whole catalogue of accusations which allowed them, as a society, to see fault not in their own actions but in the thoughts about their actions, in their imaginations, their ideas, their readings.
Many of those who sat in Strasbourg Cathedral Sunday after Sunday, listening to Geiler’s railings against the follies of the misguided reader, probably believed that he was echoing the popular grudge against the man of books. I can imagine the uncomfortable feeling of those who, like myself, wore glasses, perhaps taking them off surreptitiously as these meek helpers suddenly became a badge of dishonour. But it was not the reader and his glasses that Geiler was attacking. Far from it; his arguments were those of a humanist cleric, critical of untrained or vacuous intellectual competition, but equally strong in defending the need for literate knowledge and the value of books. He did not share the resentment growing among the general population, who saw scholars as undeservedly privileged, suffering from what John Donne described as “defects of loneliness”,20 hiding away from the real labours of the world in what several centuries later Gérard de Nerval, following Sainte-Beuve, was to call “the ivory tower”, the haven “to which we climb higher and higher to isolate ourselves from the crowd”,21 far from the gregarious occupations of the common folk. Three centuries after Geiler, Thomas Carlyle, speaking in defence of the scholar-reader, lent him heroic features: “He, with his copy-rights and his copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living.”22 But the prejudiced view persisted of the reader as an absent-minded egghead, an absconder from the world, a day-dreamer with glasses mousing through a book in a secluded corner.
The Spanish writer Jorge Manrique, a contemporary of Geiler’s, divided humankind between “those who live by their hands, and the rich”.23 Soon that division was perceived as between “those who live by their hands” and “the Book Fool”, the bespectacled reader. It is curious that glasses have never lost this unworldly association. Even those who wish to appear wise (or at least bookish) in our time take advantage of the symbol; a pair of glasses, whether prescription or not, undermines the sensuality of a face and suggests instead intellectual preoccupations. Tony Curtis wears a pair of stolen glasses while attempting to convince Marilyn Monroe that he is nothing but a naive millionaire in Some Like It Hot. And in Dorothy Parker’s famous words, “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” Opposing the strength of the body to the power of the mind, separating the homme moyen sensuel from the scholar, calls for elaborate argumentations. On one side are the workers, the slaves with no access to books, the creatures of bone and sinew, the majority of humankind; on the other, the minority, the thinkers, the elite of scribes, the intellectuals supposedly allied with authority. Discussing the meaning of happiness, Seneca granted the minority the stronghold of wisdom and scorned the opinion of the majority. “The best,” he said, “should be preferred by the majority, and instead the populace chooses the worst.… Nothing is as noxious as listening to what people say, considering right that which is approved by most, and taking as one’s model the behaviour of the masses, who live not according to reason but in order to conform.”24 The English scholar John Carey, analysing the relationship between intellectuals and the masses at the turn of our century, found Seneca’s views echoed in many of the most famous British writers of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages. “Given the multitudes by which the individual is surrounded,” Carey concluded, “it is virtually impossible to regard everyone else as having an individuality equivalent to one’s own. The mass, as a reductive and dismissive concept, is invented to ease this difficulty.”25
The argument that opposes those with the right to read, because they can read “well” (as the fearful glasses seem to indicate), and those to whom reading must be denied, because they “wouldn’t understand”, is as ancient as it is specious. “Once a thing is put into writing,” Socrates argued, “the text, whatever it might be, is taken from place to place and falls into the hands not only of those who understand it, but also of those who have no business with it [the italics are mine]. The text doesn’t know how to address the right people, and how not to address the wrong ones. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused, it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.” Right and wrong readers: for Socrates there appears to be a “correct” interpretation of a text, available only to a few informed specialists. In Victorian England, Matthew Arnold would echo this splendidly arrogant opinion: “We … are for giving the heritage neither to the Barbarians nor to the Philistines, nor yet to the Populace.”26 Trying to understand exactly what that heritage was, Aldous Huxley defined it as the special accumulated knowledge of any united family, the common property of all its members. “When we of the great Culture Family meet,” wrote Huxley, “we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats. ‘And do you remember that absolutely priceless thing Uncle Virgil said? You know. Timeo Danaos.… Priceless; I shall never forget it.’ No, we shall never forget it; and what’s more, we shall take good care that those horrid people who have had the impertinence to call on us, those wretched outsiders who never knew dear mellow old Uncle V., shall never forget it either. We’ll keep them constantly reminded of their outsideness.”27
Which came first? The invention of the masses, which Thomas Hardy described as “a throng of people … containing a certain minority who have sensitive souls; these, and the aspects of these, being what is worth observing”,28 or the invention of the bespectacled Book Fool, who thinks himself superior to the rest of the world and whom the world passes by, laughing?
Their chronology hardly matters. Both stereotypes are fictions and both are dangerous, because under the pretence of moral or social criticism they are employed in an attempt to curtail a craft that, in its essence, is neither limited nor limiting. The reality of reading lies elsewhere. Trying to discover in ordinary mortals an activity akin to creative writing, Sigmund Freud suggested that a comparison could be drawn between the inventions of fiction and those of day-dreaming, since in reading fiction “our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our mind … enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreaming without self-reproach or shame”.29 But surely that is not the experience of most readers. Depending on the time and the place, our mood and our memory, our experience and our desire, the enjoyment of reading, at its best, tightens rather than liberates the tensions of our mind, drawing them taut to make them sing, making us more, not less, aware of their presence. It is true that on occasion the world of the page passes into our conscious imaginaire — our everyday vocabulary of images — and then we wander aimlessly in those fictional landscapes, lost in wonder, like Don Quixote.30 But most of the time we tread firmly. We know that we are reading even while suspending disbelief; we know why we read even when we don’t know how, holding in our mind at the same time, as it were, the illusionary text and the act of reading. We read to find the end, for the story’s sake. We read not to reach it, for the sake of the reading itself. We read searchingly, like trackers, oblivious of our surroundings. We read distractedly, skipping pages. We read contemptuously, admiringly, negligently, angrily, passionately, enviously, longingly. We read in gusts of sudden pleasure, without knowing what brought the pleasure along. “What in the world is this emotion?” asks Rebecca West after reading King Lear. “What is the bearing of supremely great works of art on my life which makes me feel so glad?”31 We don’t know: we read ignorantly. We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had “walked over our grave”, as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us — the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.
This reading has an image. A photograph taken in 1940, during the bombing of London in the Second World War, shows the remains of a caved-in library. Through the torn roof can be seen ghostly buildings outside, and in the centre of the store is a heap of beams and crippled furniture. But the shelves on the walls have held fast, and the books lined up along them seem unharmed. Three men are standing amidst the rubble: one, as if hesitant about which book to choose, is apparently reading the titles on the spines; another, wearing glasses, is reaching for a volume; the third is reading, holding an open book in his hands. They are not turning their backs on the war, or ignoring the destruction. They are not choosing the books over life outside. They are trying to persist against the obvious odds; they are asserting a common right to ask; they are attempting to find once again — among the ruins, in the astonished recognition that reading sometimes grants — an understanding.
Readers browsing through the severely damaged library of Holland House in West London, wrecked by a fire bomb on 22 October 1940. (photo credit 21.5)