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I was caught in contemplation, the kind of thought you can only do when you’re riding someplace, a passenger, passing nondescript scenery as the corn fields sweep by in their mid-July rifts of green and beige. First, I would close my left eye, and then would reopen it and close my right, searching for a sign of my perception of color in the painterly gestures of the cornfields alongside the highway as they cascaded through my vision. It seemed that my right eye saw more vivid colors: olives, taupes, brightly decadent trumpet vine oranges. An enormous array of colors glistened before me. And my left eye seemed to seek out details, for it knew a far wider range of clarity, transforming almost everything into dull, muted earth tones and shades of gray. It was my left eye that noticed, for instance, a monarch with wings outstretched, sunning on the Queen Anne’s Lace that adorned the highway. It was in this contemplation that I lost my sense of time and place. |