A haunting memoir about coming to terms with near-blindness, this is the story of a lonely childhood spent behind bottle-lens glasses, the fear of ridicule, the struggle through college The author has managed to translate his opaque, kaleidoscopic world of shape and colour into poetic and luminous prose The book conveys life as it is lived by one whose visual impressions are 'at once beautiful and largely useless', and for whom normality is continuously transformed into an intense aesthetic experience