ceiswyn

Ky, after four months of hormonal madness: Why do I even own this belt? I can barely even get the end through the buckle!
Ky, after two months of relative hormonal stability: Second hole seems good...

About six months ago, when I was writing Hamilton having a revelation at Burr's Senate farewell speech, I thought that a great comparison would be putting on a pair of spectacles for the first time and having the world go suddenly focused but also weird. But that scene was from Hamilton's perspective, so was that a comparison he could actually make from experience?

Well, Hamilton put on glasses during the duel, known for it in fact, so surely he must have had that familiar short-sighted experience. But now that I was thinking about it from a glasses-wearer's perspective, hang on, nobody ever says anything about Ham being short-sighted, everyone just assumes his vision deteriorated with age. But what deteriorates with age is your near vision and that's really not relevant at ten paces' distance. So what was really going on?

At this point I started researching the history of optometry and, specifically, spectacles. Which did exist for both short sight and long sight; in fact, a bit before this is when Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals. Though there were no eye tests or prescription lenses, you just went to a shop and tried on spectacles until you found a pair that made you see better.

ANYWAY, in the course of all this I discovered that around the turn of the nineteenth century there was a bit of a fad for very slightly tinted glasses - usually green. They were thought to ease eyestrain caused by bright sunlight or candlelight (where there's a very high contrast between the flame itself and the dim light it casts). And what Hamilton said before putting on his spectacles was, according to Burr's second, "in certain states of the light one requires glasses".
'Aha!' I thought. And they were duelling on the western bank of the Hudson at dawn, so the sunlight would have been coming in at a low angle across the river. Exactly the sort of situation where one might suddenly get dazzled by the sun and want one's shades.

So after doing all that research, it turns out that Hamilton didn't have any actual vision problems, would have no experience with the world-in-focus moment, and so he wouldn't think of the comparison I wanted to use. But I was so cheered by my discovery that I decided to use it anyway.

"He stared down at the slight figure who stood erect and alone at the front of the room, and felt something turn over in his belly. A strange dizziness, like putting on spectacles and seeing the world go strange and then snap into a different focus."