Lenses

Dillard's story called Lenses really shows the differences in the stages of our lives. This particular piece really focuses on two separate lifestyles of this one women. Looking through lenses as a child and then again once she is all grown up. First we are introduced to a little girl with a microscope, investigating all sorts of algae and tiny specimens. She becomes almost obsessed and turns her basement into a laboratory where she spend hours and hours looking into this microscope lens, where she could only use one eye,  only see a little part of what's going on. We can make the claim that she likes the sense of being responsible for something, or having control over something when she talks about how she basically enjoys watching the tiny specimen die under her large wattage light bulb. She says, "When all of the creatures lay motionless, boiled and fried in the positions they had when the last of their water dried completely, I washed the slide in the sink and started over with a fresh drop. How I loved that deep, wet world where the colored algae waved in the water and the rotifers swam" (pg. 106). From that particular passage we can see that this little girl just likes having power. As a child, we don't have control over many things, and by overseeing this whole little world of organisms and deciding when they live and when they die gave her happiness.

The story then takes a dramatic turn to when the girl is now a women who claims the story is actually  about the description of swans. And now, she is looking through binoculars, which you can use two eyes, therefore she is seeing a larger perspective of the world now. She revisits the pond she used to go to as a little girl yet sees everything much differently than before. She looks more into the beauty of it all, slowing down to appreciate that some of these organisms are living an actually life, this is where she becomes obsessed with watching the swans. By looking through the two lenses she can see more detail for example, "It is impossible to say how excited I was to see whistling swans in Daleville, Virginia. The two were a pair, mated for life, migrating north and west from the Atlantic coast to the high arctic. They had paused to feed at Dalevillle Pond. I had flushed them, and now they were flying and circling the pond" (pg.107). When she says she had flushed them she is referring to the many samples of pond water she had just so simple destroyed and threw away, where as now she can just admire the good things about the pond that she had never recognized before. I think overall the two differences in outlooks just represent how we change the way we look at things as we grow with age and experience.