Binoculars Quotes

I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear dagger proof tunics, and as a dagger proof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguised and until every home is rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.

Goodness gracious me,' exclaimed Alexia, 'what are you wearing? It looks like the unfortunate progeny of an illicit union between a pair of binoculars and some opera glasses. What on earth are they called, binocticals, spectoculars?

As night fell, Yamamoto, aboard the huge battleship Yamato, steamed eastward at full speed into the night. Far ahead the destroyers went to flank speed to search for the US carriers. Lookouts, with the best night-vision binoculars in the world, swept the night horizon where the very dark sky meets the black ocean. The faintest shape, the tiniest pinprick of light, would show there was something out there, like the superstructure of a ship over the horizon. There was nothing.

The cat, covered in dust and standing on its hind legs, bowed to Margarita. Round its neck it was now wearing a made-up white bow tie on an elastic band, with a pair of ladies’ mother-of-pearl binoculars hanging on a cord. It had also gilded its whiskers.

The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm… maybe if I hadn’t gone with Spike… maybe if I could have lived more peaceably… maybe if I’d met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn’t done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done. The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

They say asteroids hit the moon pretty often, which is how the moon gets its crater, but this one is going to be the biggest asteroid ever to hit it and on a clear night you should be able to see the impact when it happens, maybe even with the naked eye but certainly with binoculars. They made it sound pretty dramatic, but I still don't think it's worth three homework assignments.

But when you’re a kid it’s like you’re wearing these binoculars strapped to your eyes and you can’t see anything except what’s in the dead center of the lenses

I’d ask how you’re doing and if you’ve been busy today, but these new binoculars work great—a “must-have” for all intense investigators.

Goodness gracious me,” exclaimed Alexia, “what are you wearing? It looks like the unfortunate progeny of an illicit union between a pair of binoculars and some opera glasses. What on earth are they called, binocticals, spectaculars?” The earl snorted his amusement and then tried to pretend he hadn't. “How about glassicals?” he suggested, apparently unable to resist a contribution.

I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don’t care about your economic background. I don’t care what town you’re born in, what city, what country. If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you. And so then so what do adults do? They say, “Don’t pluck the petals off the flowers. I just spent money on that. Don’t play with the egg. It might break. Don’t….” Everything is a don’t. We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down. So you get out of their way. And you know what you do? You put things in their midst that help them explore. Help ‘em explore. Why don’t you get a pair of binoculars, just leave it there one day? Watch ‘em pick it up. And watch ‘em look around. They’ll do all kinds of things with it.

I’m looking for a girlfriend. That’s why I brought binoculars.

No one cared about a woman staring through binoculars from a parked car. It was a common sight. There were three other cars with binoculared, watching women just on that block, and that was light by Night Vale standards.

Still she wondered: did the present deliver up the future, or must you chase your destiny like a harpoonist?

I like people. I like watching them. It's just I'd prefer to do it from a mile away using very poweful binoculars.

Binoculars, and a hawk-like vigilance, reduce the disadvantage of myopic human vision.

Sabine stood up, satisfied that her friends were safe and content. When she moved, Calla lifted her head. Her eyes focused in Sabine's direction. Despite the distance between them, Sabine Could have sworn Calla was looking right at her. The white wolf's ears flicked back and forth. She lifted her muzzle and howled. The sound filled Sabine with a mixture of sweetness and sorrow. The other wolves joined the song, their familiar voices blending in the winter air. Sabine watched them from another minute, then she turned and walked back to Ethan. "Everything okay?" he asked. She handed him the binoculars. "They're happy. So I'm happy." ... She turned, listening to the song carried on the stiff winter breeze. Nev's voice rose about the other wolves' as the chorus of howls wove through the air. Sabine wondered if somehow they knew she was here, and if they might be saying good-bye or if they were asking her to stay.

And I loved you I loved you so There were times I forgot to breathe Waiting for the phone call For the sound of your voice Touching me places You couldn't touch For the miles between us. And I loved you Like a forest loves the spring Waiting for the smallest signs Of you coming back And breathing life back into me Warming me up On my brightest fields And my darkest valleys But you stayed away. And I loved you But fate seemed to have Different plans for us. I guess now I see that It was a one-sided love Peeking through The large glasses of a binocular I am here, so very close But you are far-far-away...

I partnered you with Jim all those years ago because you were complimentary kinds of crazy. You kept each other in check. I need you to not crawl back inside your own skull and watch the world with binoculars from deep cover.

It’s almost painful, the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at—the way they haven’t learned yet how to conceal what matters to them, even if it’s just chewing gum or a plush dolphin or plastic binoculars.

He wore binoculars around his neck the way librarians wear their glasses.

Don't get your panties all twisted over a pair of binoculars" "There will be no talk of the duchess's panties" Jareth warned,but a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

Man as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. He can see, hear, touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him. By using scientific instruments he can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses. For example, he can extend the range of his vision by binoculars or of his hearing by electrical amplification. But the most elaborate apparatus cannot do more than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes, or make faint sounds more audible. No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.

I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference." ― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, (from "Mates")

The Death of Allegory I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance displaying their capital letters like license plates. Truth cantering on a powerful horse, Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils. Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat, Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended, Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall, Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm. They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes. Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator. Valor lies in bed listening to the rain. Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood, and all their props are locked away in a warehouse, hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles. Even if you called them back, there are no places left for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss. The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair. Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies and next to it black binoculars and a money clip, exactly the kind of thing we now prefer, objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case, themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow, an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray. As for the others, the great ideas on horseback and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns, it looks as though they have traveled down that road you see on the final page of storybooks, the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

together any sort of response to that, so I turned and left. At the store, I got a bag and started stuffing it with one of everything in sight. When I got to the binoculars, I took

When I looked back at my stalker, he was staring at me. Holding my binoculars. With smoothie dribbling down my chin. I’d been caught looking every bit the stalker in this situation. Kill me now.

They weren’t creepy stalker binoculars. Because I wasn’t a stalker. He was. These were like fancy opera watching binoculars. Or ones you’d use to watch the Kentucky Derby. I wasn’t doing anything weird.

He gave her that last word. He gave her his love. He would think of her almost every day for the rest of his life. Only his presence would he withhold.

I stood at the window, where I once stood with my father looking out through binoculars, and even now small winged creatures occasionally flitted by, but they were no more than reminders that birds mean nothing at all to me anymore.

I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

Like a battalion of marines at roll call, her neck hairs marshaled to five-alarm status. She stumbled back to her desk, jerked open the botton drawer, retrieved a pair of Nighthawk binoculars, fixed the scopes on him, and fiddled with the focus. Gotcha. Hair the colour of coal. Chocolate brown eyes. A five-o'clock shadow ringing his craggy jawline. Handsome as the day was long... He sauntered towards her, oozing charisma from every pore. Charlee forgot to breathe. And then he committed the gravest sin of all, knocking her world helter-skelter. The scoundrel smiled.

Rock City begins as an ornamental garden on a mountain side: its visitors walk a path that takes them through rocks, over rocks, between rocks. They throw corn into a deer enclosure, cross a hanging bridge, and peer out through a-quarter-a-throw binoculars at a view that promises them seven states on the rare sunny days when the air is perfectly clear. And from there, like a drop into some strange hell, the path takes visitors, millions upon millions of them every year, down into caverns, where they stare at black-lit dolls arranged into nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale dioramas. When they leave, they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of whether they had a good time or not.

The binoculars in my hands were stolen.

Table 3–1. Definitions of Cognitive Distortions 1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water. 4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. 5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. 6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.” 7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” 8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. 9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. 10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as me cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right

To clarify Rear Window, I’d suggest this parable: The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses. And Hitchcock? He is the man we love to be hated by.

Imagine you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore? Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped up on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico. Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon? Explain.

The heart sags. My footprints forget me. I don’t think anything will ever be the same. This is the edge of the cliff and you can’t move, can’t jump. Everything is vertical. With binoculars you can see where you’ll be in an hour. Raindrops collect on the lens. A fine mist. It hides us. It drifts into clocks. Gravity presses your hands. Some hurts never get said. Some get smuggled.

From the slope of Haleakala, the Old Broad watched the activity in the channel with a two-hundred-power celestial telescope and a pair of "big eyes" binoculars that looked like stereo bazookas on precision mounts that were anchored into a ton of concrete.

With my new habit of carrying binoculars everywhere, I feel imbued with a readiness to see, an attitude that my life itself is a kind of field trip. The urban naturalist has the terrific luxury of stepping out her door and into "the field," without long rides or carpools, or putting money in for gas and Dairy Queen. When does the field trip being? Whenever we start paying attention.

He, the true writer, is the department store dummy at the very center of the whole establishment, the one left alone on display all night, a price tag stapled to every piece of clothing they’ve yanked onto him, binoculars and frog flippers included. He is the neutral, generic human form, the gray center who must always assume disguises — in order to be seen and, therefore, to feel himself.

Science and theology are both lenses through which to interact with and interpret reality, sort of like a microscope and a pair of binoculars. Both sets of lenses tell us more about the world than we could see with the naked eye, but the information we get from each can diverge considerably.

The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream.

A teasing smirk flitted across his face, as he completed his thought, “I’ll try not to take it too hard if I fail miserably, because you can be the world’s greatest skeptic…” “Nah…” I coughed out a little chuckle, “not when you’re involved. I’m your number one fan…You couldn’t shake me if you tried.” I gave him a playful wink, adding musingly, “Though I might stop short of hanging out in the bushes with binoculars…” “Well, then,” he grinned, “clearly you’re not my number one fan.

The things I feel cannot be put into words, or if they can, the words are in no language anyone can understand. My emotions are talking in tongues. Joy spins into anger spins into fear then into amused irony, like leaping from a plane, arms wide, knowing beyond a shadow of doubt that you can fly, then discovering you can't, and not only don't you have a parachute, but you don't have any clothes on, and people below all have binoculars and are laughing as you plummet to a highly embarrassing down.

His mistake was to think that, by seeing objectively, he was seeing the street in its entirety. What he didn't see -- what he completely missed -- was the strangest and most remarkable sight in the whole of Lough Street: an unshaven, wild-eyed man sitting in a parked van, staring at an empty house through binoculars and furiously taking notes.

What a rich phrase. You could live a life on the income it yielded.

But you said the words you knew, which were not always the ones you meant.

tried to sleep. From the pilothouse of the aged trawler, I peered through my binoculars and the windscreen toward the yacht. When my eyes adjusted

binoculars and took another look

The three of us made love like one of us was a voyeur. I was the only one using binoculars as a sex toy.


Stop and unplug,” say I; “look around you, at the vastness and greatness of the natural world.” Some stop. Others need binoculars to tie their shoelaces.

Those two moods are so different! Is everyone in your family like that?" .... "Unquestionably." Baden nodded. "Good to know. I'll buy a shield and some binoculars.

It’s as though I’m looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, and no matter how far I stretch out my hand, I can’t touch them.

If you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you’re looking through binoculars the wrong way

A brick could be used like Dracula uses binoculars. I swear that pervert peeps on me every night from the tree across the street.


Put the binoculars away because my room faces the back. You’ve got no shot of a peep show.

I go out to the cliffs with binoculars to see whales find their way in from the southern mist and I walk here in this paddock, stubbornly, wondering at the heat each of us leaves in our wake.

Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Paul stepped past her, lifting his binoculars. He adjusted their internal pressure with a quick twist, focused the oil lenses on the other cliff, lifting golden tan in morning light across open sand. Jessica

Karl Selig steadied himself on the ship’s rail and peered through the binoculars at the massive iceberg. Another piece of ice crumbled and fell, revealing more of the long black object. It looked almost like

Know what I think?" said Perry. "I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did."' "Did what?" "Out there." Dick dropped the binoculars into a leather case, a luxurious receptacle initialed H. W. C. He was annoyed. Annoyed as hell. Why the hell couldn't Perry shut up? Christ Jesus, what damn good did it do, always dragging the goddam thing up? It really was annoying. Especially since they'd agreed, sort of, not to talk about the goddam thing. Just forget it. "There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that," Perry said. "Deal me out, baby," Dick said. "I'm a normal." And Dick meant what he said. He thought himself as balanced, as sane as anyone - maybe a bit smarter than the average fellow, that's all. But Perry - there was, in Dick's opinion, "something wrong" with Little Perry.

He must turn to something solid, because if he didn't, who knew where his mind or his soul could blow away to, like a balloon without ballast.... He raised the binoculars and scoured the island for more signs of life: he needed to see the goats, the sheep; to count them. Stick to the solid. To the brass fittings which had to be polished, the glass which had to be cleaned—first the outer glass of the lantern, then the prisms themselves. Getting the oil in, keeping the cogs moving smoothly, topping up the mercury to let the light glide. He gripped each thought like the rung of a ladder by which to haul himself back to the knowable; back to this life.

Loni watched the horse through her binoculars. Shifting auroras reflected off its pearlescent mane, sending a cascade of prismatic brilliance across its ivory coat. Hands, smaller than Loni's own, held on to its silver reins.

the Chicago Symphony was in a class by itself. Fritz Reiner, the famous Hungarian conductor, was fascinating to watch. He was somewhat stout, hunched over with round shoulders, and his arm and baton movements were tiny—you almost had to look at him with binoculars to see what he was doing. But those tiny movements forced the players to peer at him intently, and then he would suddenly raise his arms up over his head and the entire orchestra would go crazy.

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it in Pity the Nation: They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, young men, babies and grandparents—lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field-glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington Post] cursed a lot. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror. “Sharon!” he shouted. “That fucker [Ariel] Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.

telling me?’ ‘He put,’ I say, ‘the strap of his binoculars around my neck.’ ‘And then what?’ ‘He . . .’ I stop. I hate this man with his thick eyebrows, his beery paunch, his impatient stubby fingers. I hate him more, perhaps, than the man beside the tarn.

El mundo se desvaneció y se formó un túnel en su visión. Era como mirar a través de unos binoculares angostos que hacían que el mundo fuera extremadamente nítido y, sin embargo, era incapaz de comprender lo que estaba viendo. El chico…. El Centinela… Era Adrián.

Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the number of stars you can see from a single location rises to about 50,000, and with a small two-inch telescope it leaps to 300,000.

To all the haters who think I’ll never get married and am going to die alone as a cat lady, I say ha! I’ll be the crazy bird woman with binoculars and a camouflage poncho, silently hiding out in reeds or woods. As a stealth ninja, a friend of the beaked and feathered.

The wife sits in the backyard with binoculars. She is trying to learn about the birds. She has seen robins and sparrows and wrens. A green-throated hummingbird. She wants to know the name of the black bird with the red wings. She looks it up. It is a red-winged blackbird.

Hamlet: The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter. I am trying, standing in the door, To discover in the distant echoes What the coming years may hold in store. The nocturnal darkness with a thousand Binoculars is focused onto me. Take away this cup, O Abba, Father, Everything is possible to thee. I am fond of this thy stubborn project, And to play my part I am content. But another drama is in progress, And, this once, O let me be exempt. But the plan of action is determined, And the end irrevocably sealed. I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood: Life is not a walk across a field.

Well, go back and do a bit of howling yourself,’ suggested George. ‘It may frighten the howler as much as his howling scared you.’ ‘Not a chance,’ said Julian promptly. ‘I’m not going in for any howling matches.’ He burrowed down under the rug for his binoculars and slung them round his neck. ‘I’m

Look at that crowd', he said disgustedly. 'They think it's a circus.' 'And not a single coin are they donating', said Dina. 'That's not surprising. Pity can only be shown in small doses. When so many beggars are in one place, the public goes like this' - he put his fists to his eyes, like binoculars.

But the most amazing thing is the sight I’m looking at right now, and I don’t need the binoculars to see it either: Michael wearing nothing but board shorts as he lies in the hammock across from mine, reading a book on microprocessing (I do hope the micros and the processors end up happily ever after at the end)

Scarlett activated the viola and it came down like short shimmering curtain that covered her eyes with a band of violet light. It dilated her eyes, increasing her binocular summation so that everything in her field of vision was magnified and clear. It also protected her retinas from any sort of laser fire or plasma flash.

He smiled at her, handsome Alan, who was always used to getting his own way. He hadn’t changed. Alan, who was already as faithless to Cinta as he had been to her. Suddenly, like a focus in binoculars, everything became clear. This was a man worth spending not one more minute thinking about, second-guessing or trying to understand.

Make music. In fact, make your own instruments. See who can make the craziest, most unexpected instrument out of the materials you have lying around the house. Set up a bird-watching station at the front window. Include the necessary bird books and binoculars, of course, but don’t forget the kazoos and party poppers to celebrate the birds’ arrival.

They were relieved that I was chosen by a human being," she'd said to Angelica in her dry voice. "They were braced for an interspecies liaison.

Werner shyly. “Oh, come on, you didn’t already know?” With his glasses on, Frederick’s expression seems to ease; his face makes more sense—this, Werner thinks, is who he is. A soft-skinned boy in glasses with taffy-colored hair and the finest trace of a mustache needled across his lip. Bird lover. Rich kid. “I barely hit anything in marksmanship. You really didn’t know?” “Maybe,” says Werner. “Maybe I knew. How did you pass the eye exams?” “Memorized the charts.” “Don’t they have different ones?” “I memorized all four. Father got them ahead of time. Mother helped me study.” “What about your binoculars?” “They’re prescription. Cost a fortune.” They sit in a big kitchen at a butcher’s block with a marble cap. The maid named Fanni emerges with a dark loaf and a round of

That night, after we'd had our tea, Kevin and I went bird-watching. Not the usual sort, plodding round the fields with great binoculars round your neck (though I did take my work binoculars). No, we go up in the big trees in the wood, where the birds live. Right to the tops we go, where the branches sway and swing like a comfy bed, and you can look along the green billows of the tree-tops. In spring, we take the eggs out of the nests, handling them gentle, like, and putting them back afterwards of course. An' getting away quickly, so the hen-bird can come back and sit on them again. That's a wonder of life to me; to hold a speckled egg in the palm of your hand, and think what a marvellous thing it's going to become, a bird that flies and feeds and takes its chance with the cats, and breeds its own young and dies back into the dust in the end. Why does anyone need those crazy Christian dreams of Heaven, wi' angels playin' their harps on fleecy clouds, when they can have a wood at sunset, when you can look down from a low branch and see young rabbits playing, or even young foxes tumbling over and over and squeaking when they nip each other with their sharp little teeth?

You may have no computer, but thank The Divine One for giving you a brain. You may have no television, but thank The Divine One for giving you an imagination. You may have no counselor, but thank The Divine One for giving you a conscience. You may have no binoculars, but thank The Divine One for giving you eyes. You may have no megaphone, but thank The Divine One for giving you a mouth. You may have no defender, but thank The Divine One for giving you hands. You may have no food, but thank The Divine One for giving you teeth. You may have no car, but thank The Divine One for giving you feet. You may have no degrees, but thank The Divine One for giving you talents. You may have no job, but thank The Divine One for giving you potential. You may have no career, but thank The Divine One for giving you inspiration. You may have no money, but thank The Divine One for giving you ambition. You may have no possessions, but thank The Divine One for giving you character. You may have no titles, but thank The Divine One for giving you honor. You may have no magic, but thank The Divine One for giving you intuition. You may have no friends, but thank The Divine One for giving you angels.

By closing one eye, you removed binocular vision, the slight variance in images, called “binocular disparity,” that occurs when we view an object with both eyes open. Binocular vision—sometimes called “depth perception”—allows us to see the world as three-dimensional. When you close one eye, the single image is two-dimensional—that is, it is flat, like a photograph, and therefore can be “copied” onto flat paper.

I was ready to give up when my eyes find someone who wasn’t familiar to me. For some reason, I feel drawn to her. What the hell? That’s never happened to me before, not even with Jennifer. “Hey, Sam, do you know that girl?” Sam took the binoculars from me to take a look. “No, never seen her before.” I scaled my way down the wall, jumping onto the sand, as Sam called out to me. “Hey! Where are you going dude?” “To meet someone new.

Through the binoculars, I saw it stretch. It lay back down. It was the ruler of its life. It was the expression of this place. Its mere presence signified its “power.” The world was its throne, it filled the space it inhabited. It incarnated that mysterious concept of the king’s body. A true regent is content simply to be. He does not trouble to act, and sees no need to make appearances. His existence is the foundation of his authority.

I close my eyes for a moment and open my inner eye. I stare at Pete, and the thing in his arms. Human. Cat. Human. Cat. No doubled vision: it's a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision, and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement.

For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn't know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of "yodeling in the canyon" and "tying the tube," of "groaning in the pit,""slipping the turtle's head," and "chewing the stinkweed." Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux's gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers' feet and hands are doing. And we'd have to admit, too, that in our most intimate moments, alone at night with our beating hearts, asking God to save us, what comes most often is Lux, succubus of those binocular nights.

The office, which had an outside entrance for ordinary visitors, was separated from the parlor by a sliding door; though Mr. Clutter occasionally shared the office with Gerald Van Vleet, a young man who assisted him with the management of the farm, it was fundamentally his retreat—an orderly sanctuary, paneled in walnut veneer, where, surrounded by weather barometers, rain charts, a pair of binoculars, he sat like a captain in his cabin, a navigator piloting River Valley’s sometimes risky passage through the seasons.

Khizar, can you see that star emitting bright yellow light?” She asked me while handing over the binocular she was using to see the stars. We were standing on the terrace of our university cafe. I looked through the very powerful lenses of the binocular and said “Yes, I can see. Looks like a star that must have died millions of years ago but we can still see the stardust it emitted while exploding” She took the binocular from my hands, looked into my eyes and said “Khizar, you know memories are like those particles of the stardust of a star which died millions of years ago but we can see them emitting lights now. I hope you won’t become a star that once existed in my universe”  I looked at her. Except for the tears floating in her eyes betraying the emotional turmoil she was suffering from, she was as calm as the sea is after a storm. They say that every atom in a human body is the grain of the stardust of the stars which exploded millions of years ago. Then I understood why her eyes used to sparkle when she was looking at me.

understanding. As they progressed west across the crater floor, they saw more gazelles and zebras and buffalo than she could count. She glassed the grasslands through the binoculars for a bottleneck of Land Rovers, hoping it would indicate a predator sighting. The strategy paid off. The first gathering led them to a chilled-out leopard lounging in the crotch of an acacia tree, the second to a pack of spotted hyenas making whooping-giggling noises while tearing apart the ribcage of an antelope with their bone-crushing jaws.

Just as I could not imagine a world in stereo depth, an individual with normal normal stereopsis cannot experience the worldview of a person who has always lacked steropsis. This may be surprising because you can eliminate clues from stereopsis simply by closing one eye. What's more, many people do not notice a great difference when viewing the world with one eye or two. When a normal binocular viewer closes one eye, however, he or she still uses a lifetime of past visual experiences to re-create the missing stereo information.

I can see the driver as if I'm looking at him through binoculars, bending to adjust the volume on his radio, eyes wide at what he hears, which I can't understand because when he hits you there is only silence. My feet, pounding through the grass, make no sound. I know that my mouth is open, that air is rushing across my stretched vocal chords, but I hear nothing. You lift into the air and the car is past before you land silently at my feet, as if something as small as you couldn't possibly make a sound in a world where buildings can come down.

I began writing this story by subverting the dominant discourse, but that did not last long. My story decided to assert its independence. I tried to rupture all vestiges of received form, but my story fought back. It wanted to go live with its Aristotelian parents. "I'm sick of being experimented on," it said. "What's so lame about catharsis?" Then it stormed out of the barber shop, mid trim, and fumbled down the sidewalk, weak from surgery, thin in description, gaping with holes, and absolutely riddled with bruised sentences. I watched it with binoculars, but decided not to chase after it. I never liked that story anyway.

Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley - for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, "planned" communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird's talons, taking your breath away. 'The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,' Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth. ("Family")

Some people say he engineered his own arrest to gain an insight into modern methods of policing for a thriller he had planned. But you know what happens to artistic rats in prison: they have their rectums stretched, and not by overindulgence in Michelin-star food; they have their columns examined, and not by internet humorists or a qualified medical practitioner. I’m sure Rat knew this, too. Although he likes to accumulate a wide general knowledge, he would rather have a narrow rectum. A colon comes in handy here, before examples: two dots on top of one other, like the cowboys who copulate on Brokeback Mountain, on a slope so far away you need binoculars to see them properly. In prison there are too many insights and examples. Rat would never risk it.

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie… Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics…

The reaction of the people below to this fantastic sight and sound was one of wild excitement. Details could be seen vividly from aloft. An elderly man and woman fell to their knees and prayed. People in the villages stood still and gaped upward. Most of them still had their Sunday finery on. "You could see people going to church...man, wife, and child walking along the country roads." Bombardier Herbert Light, through his binoculars, saw an open-air festival in progress, with the women dressed in colorful skirts and blouses. One of them threw her apron over her head in panic. As they roared over the wheat fields, the first unfriendly acts occurred: farmers threw stones and pitchforks at them. One farmer leading two horses was startled by the advancing planes and leaped into a nearby stream. A girl swimming in another river was reported by ten separate crews.

Looks to me like you could stand to lose a few things,” he said. “Want some help?” “Actually,” I said, smiling ruefully at him, “yes.” “All right, then. Here’s what I want you to do: pack up that thing just like you’re about to hike out of here for this next stretch of trail and we’ll go from there.” He walked toward the river with the nub of a toothbrush in hand—the end of which he’d thought to break off to save weight, of course. I went to work, integrating the new with the old, feeling as if I were taking a test that I was bound to fail. When I was done, Albert returned and methodically unpacked my pack. He placed each item in one of two piles—one to go back into my pack, another to go into the now-empty resupply box that I could either mail home or leave in the PCT hiker free box on the porch of the Kennedy Meadows General Store for others to plunder. Into the box went the foldable saw and miniature binoculars and the megawatt flash for the camera I had yet to use. As I looked on, Albert chucked aside the

Perhaps the Hungarian humorist Ferencz Karinthy captures the spirit of the situation best in a tableau about a bored businessman who amuses himself by looking through high-powered binoculars from his office high in a skyscraper into neighbouring office rooms. On one occasion he spies a middle-aged executive chasing a comely secretary around his desk. As it happens the observers knows the building in which this drama is taking place and can even make out the name of the occupant from the plaque on his desk. He consults the telephone directory and gives the culprit, who is still trying to force his attentions on the secretary, a ring. When the culprit answers the telephone the observer announces himself as God Almighty and tells him to stop molesting the young woman in his employ. The culprit, thunderstruck and unable to account fo the observer's exact knowledge of what has been going on, fall son his knees in a paroxysm of fear and wonder and begs forgiveness. The observer roundly berates the culprit who swears he will do anything to make amends and promises never to sin again. Hereupon the observer informs the culprit that he can indeed make amends by lending him 100 pengo [dollars]. The answer, of course is a burst of profanity and the abrupt termination of the call. Karinthy then draws his moral: if you want to play God don't try to borrow money...

O outro não é apenas um duplo especular, ao modo de um espelho do Eu. Para começar, o outro tem dois olhos, não apenas um. Então em qual ponto de vista devemos nos colocar? Se os olhos piscam ao mesmo tempo, a imagem permanece ainda que não esteja em presença. Mas, se alternamos o piscar entre um olho e outro, o objeto começa a se movimentar, em função de um efeito de ilusão chamado paralaxe. Ou seja, o fato de nós termos uma visão binocular e supormos no outro um único ponto de vista corresponde a uma diferença estrutural entre o eu e o outro. Isso ocorre também porque há um ponto de ausência na visão, bem no centro do cone ótico, chamado mácula. Além disso, a visão, tomada nesse sentido geométrico, equivale à audição, não à escuta. Para escutar e não só ouvir, assim como olhar e não só ver, é preciso subtrair a representação antecipada que fazemos do outro, da imagem, e que não é uma ilusão ótica, mas uma ilusão cognitiva. Quando alguém começa a aprender a arte do desenho, uma das primeiras lições, e talvez a mais importante, no sentido inaugural, é que você deve se ater ao que objetivamente está vendo, não ao que se “sabe” sobre o formato de uma maçã ou das arestas de um cubo. Isso significa que, para que os dois olhos colaborem na apreensão de uma única imagem, é preciso pensar a partir do quadro, colocar-se no lugar do outro, mas também supor o que o quadro “ignora” sobre sua própria composição. Por exemplo, o tamanho, a disposição e a distribuição dos volumes impõem involuntariamente ao observador que se coloque no ponto exato em que o quadro forma uma boa imagem. Se nos colocamos a menos de um palmo ou a mais de cem metros da Mona Lisa, sua experiência estética simplesmente será outra. Ocorre que, nesse ponto, ao qual nos ajustamos automaticamente – como ajustamos a distância exata à qual um bebê é capaz de formar seu foco visual, sem que ninguém tenha nos ensinado isso –, emerge outro fenômeno: nos vemos sendo vistos. Nossa percepção é a de que fazemos parte da tela e estamos imersos no espaço do museu. Ou seja, recebemos nossa própria imagem, que nos enxerga ali onde não nos vemos. É assim também com a escuta. Reconhecemos o que o outro não escuta, o que ele mesmo diz, e não adianta simplesmente dizer isso, gritar ou se exasperar, porque ele não escuta. E isso acontece porque, no fundo, “não pode escutar”, pois aquilo foi feito para ficar nessa zona cinzenta do não escutado. Não obstante, há restos – penumbras, zonas de transição, rastros daquilo que não se escuta perfeitamente –, mas que se denunciam como ruídos, particularmente em distorções, exageros, inibições e excepcionalidades da sua expressividade. O senso comum tenta eliminar tais ruídos entendendo que atrapalham a funcionalidade das relações. A psicanálise dá atenção a essas bobagens e imperfeições comunicativas, pois presume que nelas falta o que não pode ser realmente escutado e que de fato está determinando impasses relacionais.