Cut From Steel

He labelled his paint tubes because he lost the colours

Claude Monet was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes more than a decade before he agreed to do anything about them.

Monet described precisely what was going. Reds turned muddy. Pink became insipid. The intermediate tones vanished from his sight altogether, and he began putting labels on his paint tubes because he could no longer tell the colours apart on the palette in front of him.

He refused surgery for years, and he had his reasons. Monet knew what had happened to Honoré Daumier and to Mary Cassatt, two painters whose operations had gone badly, and he was not prepared to gamble a working eye on it.

By 1923 he could put it off no longer, and a surgeon named Coutela operated. Monet spent ten days immobilised afterwards and loathed every hour of it. He wrote to Coutela that it was criminal to have put him in that situation.

The recovery was not clean either. Monet saw the world tinted blue for a period, and when he looked properly at the canvases painted while his lenses were clouding, he destroyed some of them for the harshness of the colour.

By 1925 the sight in his right eye had improved and he was working in delicate blues and greens again. He died the following year. The thing taking his sight was found early and dealt with late. That gap is the whole of today's letter.

You would not notice this one going

You had your eyes tested when the reading glasses stopped doing the job, and the optician sold you a stronger pair. Nothing hurts, so you have not been back since.

I want to tell you about the one that gives no warning at all. The National Eye Institute says that at first, glaucoma usually has no symptoms, and that half of the people who have it do not know they have it.

You cannot feel a field of vision narrowing. Your brain fills the missing part in for you, using the other eye.

It's not age. It's these three.

I will give you three things the National Eye Institute says about glaucoma, and one appointment to make this month.

01 / It Takes The Edges First

Glaucoma usually starts with your side vision, and specifically the part closest to your nose. Nobody experiences that as a black patch appearing. You experience it as nothing whatsoever, because a man does not audit his own peripheral vision, and the good eye covers for the one losing ground.

02 / What Is Gone Stays Gone

The National Eye Institute is blunt on this point. Treatment will not undo damage already done to your vision, but it can stop it getting worse. So every month of delay is not a neutral month. It is a slice of your field of view that you either keep or do not.

03 / Who Should Be Going

The Institute names the higher-risk groups... people over 60, especially those who are Hispanic or Latino, African American people over 40, and anyone with glaucoma in the family. For those at higher risk the recommendation is a comprehensive dilated eye exam every one to two years. A dilated exam is a different thing from the sight test that sold you the glasses.

Take it back today

I owe you some perspective, because frightening you is not the object. Glaucoma is treatable, and most people who are diagnosed and treated keep useful vision for the rest of their lives. The men who lose their sight to it are overwhelmingly the men who found out late.

You should also treat this as one of a set rather than a one-off. Eyes, ears and teeth are the three repairs men defer longest, and every one of them is cheaper, simpler and less frightening the earlier it gets caught.

I want one phone call from you today. Ask specifically for a comprehensive dilated eye exam, and mention your age and any family history when you book it. Use the word dilated, so that whoever takes the call books enough time for it.

You would notice a knee going within a week and an eye going not at all. Book the dilated exam this month and keep the field of view you still have. None of this gets easier by waiting a year.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits for the repairs men keep deferring:

A man thinking about his eyes should spend money on something worth looking at.

01 / Optics · A proper pair of binoculars

Something like a Zeiss Conquest HD in 8x42 is the sort of purchase a man makes once and then leaves by the back door for thirty years. Eight times magnification is the honest ceiling for handheld use, and the 42mm objective is what lets you see anything at dusk. Cheap binoculars give you a headache within ten minutes. Good ones make an ordinary hillside worth an afternoon.

02 / Watch · Nomos Tangente

Made in Glashütte in eastern Germany, with a Bauhaus dial that is about as legible as a watch face can be made... plain baton numerals, a lot of white space, and a thin hand-wound movement built in-house. It is a design-museum object you can wear to work. For a letter about eyesight, a watch you can actually read at arm's length feels like the correct recommendation.

03 / Wall · One framed print you chose yourself

Look at what is on your walls. Most of it arrived with the house, or with a partner, or from a shop that sold it by the yard. Pick one image that means something to you, pay a framer properly rather than buying the ready-made frame, and hang it where you sit. It costs less than a night out and it changes the room permanently.