I recommend "Out of Blindness," a personal essay by Gladys Swan in the Winter 2005 issue of The Sewanee Review. (It's not online, you'll have to read it on paper!) The essay is rich in references and quotations about the physiology of the eye, seeing, blindness, color, and artists. One interesting part of the piece concerns the evolution of sight: on the one hand our gradual loss of distance vision as we have drifted toward myopia, and on the other our changing perception of color, especially toward the blue end of the spectrum. Some think, as Swan remarks, that for Homer and Virgil, and their contemporaries, the Mediterranean actually appeared black not blue. Was that the color of Homer's wine dark sea? What color was the wine?
Sight is one of those mysteries of nature we usually take for granted until something goes wrong. We assume that everyone sees the world as we do, and yet all the evidence is that very likely we all see it just a little differently, no two colors ever just the same: like a bank of televisions or computer monitors in an electronics store with almost infinite variation of shades, tones, and brightness. We strive for perfection in our instruments, but we take our physical limitations pretty much for granted.
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