Listener's Digest: June 22, 2024

In The Yale Review, Lydia Davis writes about seeing the dark:

Absolute, unbroken darkness feels like one massive, enveloping substance, though it is not a substance and is not palpable. It feels close to the face, right up against the face. We need some light—even the faintest light will do—to create a perception of dimensional space. When there is no light at all, I have no depth perception, and so the darkness seems to press up against me. When I look into the near-complete darkness in my darkened bedroom at night, I sometimes see stipples, or pixels, evenly spread through the space, overlaying the dim shapes of furniture and walls, and I think perhaps they are coming from my eyes themselves.

The final sentence hints at a theory of vision floated in Plato’s Timaeus, on which the eyes emit rays of fire that mix with ambient light to brush the surfaces of things:

Now the pure fire inside us [the gods] made to flow through the eyes… [Whenever] daylight surrounds the visual stream, like ma…