在我们被各种电子产品和显示屏包围的今天，眼睛也在发生着改变：近视、远视和散光，甚至手机导致的暂时性失眠，无一不体现出这一点。我们到底应该如何呵护这扇越来越狭窄的“心灵之窗”？

The eyes are unwell. Their childhood suppleness¹ is lost. The lenses, as we log hours on this earth, thicken, stiffen², even calcify³. The eyes are no longer windows on souls. They’re closer to teeth.

我们眼睛的状态每日愈下-属于童年时期的高适应性已经一去不回。从我们诞生在这个地球上开始，晶状体就变得越来越厚浊、僵硬，甚至钙化。眼睛不再是心灵的窗户，它们越来越像牙齿。

To see if your own eyes are hardening, look no further than your phone, which should require no exertion⁴; you’re probably already there. Keep peering at your screen, reading and staring, snubbing life’s third dimension and natural hues⁵. The first sign of the eyes’ becoming teeth is the squinting⁶ at phones. Next comes the reflexive extending of the arm, the impulse to resize letters into the preschool range. And at last the buying of drugstore readers.

如果想检测自己的眼球是否在“硬化”，不用怎么费劲，看手机就行-也许你早就将目光转向了那边。凝视屏幕、阅读、目不转睛，不要去管真实空间的第三维度和自然光线。眼睛向牙齿发展的第一个征兆是，我们会眯起眼来看手机；接着便是不断地调整屏幕的距离；再就是调大字号；最终是去配眼镜。

Modern medicine offers little apart from magnifying glasses to treat presbyopia (from the Greek presbus, meaning “old man”). But those $3.99 specs will get you on your feet just fine, which is to say, you can once again relish⁷ your phone without squinting or arm-stretching. A remedy for farsightedness evidently succeeds to the degree that it restores a woman or man to the comfortable consumption of texts, email, ecommerce, and social media on a glazed⁸ rectangle of aluminum⁹ alloys¹⁰ held at a standard reading distance of 16 inches. With reading glasses we live again.

有了眼镜这一现代医学的产物，你就可以重新沉浸到手机的世界中，既不用眯缝起眼睛，也不用伸长胳膊。近视眼和远视眼的治疗方案显然很成功，以标准的 16 英寸（约 40 厘米）为阅读距离，被这一问题困扰的人士可以舒适地阅读铝合金发光屏幕上的短信、邮件，处理电子商务，或者使用社交媒体。眼镜让我们获得了重生。

Doesn’t this seem like an unwholesome loop? The eyes may be unwell, but the primary object of our eyesight seems corrosive¹¹. We measure our vision against the phone, all the while suspecting the phone itself is compromising our ability to see it.

可是，这难道不是一个恶性循环吗？视力本来就不好，但主要的注视对象似乎又会严重侵害视力。我们以手机为标准来衡量视力，又同时怀疑正是手机在折损我们看清它所呈现出的内容的能力。

Even if we don’t say out loud that failing vision has something to do with our vastly narrowed visual field, our bodies seem to know what’s up. How convenient, for example, that you can turn up a phone’s contrast and brightness with a few taps. If perception can’t be improved, objects can be made more perceivable, right? But then the brightness seems, like morphine, to produce a need for more brightness, and you find yourself topping out, hitting the button in vain for more light only to realize that’s it. You’ve blinded yourself to the light that was already there.

即使嘴上不愿承认日渐衰弱的视力与视野的普遍变窄有关，但我们的身体仍很诚实。例如，只要稍微动动手指，就可以轻松地调节手机屏幕的对比度和亮度。虽然无法改善自身的视觉能力，但这可以让所视之物变得更容易看清不是吗？然而，屏幕亮度恰如吗啡，会使人调节上瘾，直到调到最顶部还徒劳地按加号-你用这些光线闪瞎了自己。

What might modern vision be today without the phone as its reason for being? If you were a nomadic¹² goatherd in the Mongolian grasslands¹³, you might not even consider presbyopia a pathology.

如果手机没有成为日常必需品，现代人的视觉会变成什么样？如果你是一名生活在蒙古草原上的牧民，也许都不会认为老花眼是种病。

There are at least two recorded cases of something called smartphone blindness. The New England Journal of Medicine notes that both patients had been reading their phones in bed, on their sides, faces half-hidden, in the dark. “We hypothesized that the symptoms were due to differential bleaching¹⁴ of photo-?pigment¹⁵, with the viewing eye becoming light-adapted.” Differential bleaching of the eyes! Fortunately, smartphone blindness of this kind is transient.

目前，已经至少出现了两例记录在案的智能手机眼盲症。《新英格兰医学杂志》（The New England Journal of Medicine）注意到，两例患者都喜欢在黑暗中侧身斜眼看手机。“我们推测，随着眼睛越来越适应屏幕亮度，两眼视觉细胞中的光敏色素会不同程度地褪去，从而导致了这些症状。”唯一值得庆幸的是，智能手机眼盲症是暂时的。

Lately, when I pull away from the screen to stare into the middle distance for a spell, I take off my glasses. I try to find a tree. If I’m inside, I open a window; if I’m outside, I will even approach a tree. I don’t want mediation¹⁶ or glass. The trees are still strangers; I hardly know their names yet, but I’m testing myself on leaf shapes and shades of green. All I know so far is that trees are very unlike screens. They’re a prodigious¹⁷ interface¹⁸. Very buggy. When my eyes settle after a minute or two, I-what’s that expression, “the scales fell from my eyes”? It’s almost, at times, like that.

最近，当我把眼睛移开屏幕，然后向中远距离处看一段时间后，我会摘下眼镜。我试着找一棵树。如果我在室内，那就打开窗户；如果在室外，我甚至会走近一棵树。我只想用裸眼去观察它们。树木对我来说还很陌生；我几乎不知道它们的名称，但还是努力观察叶片的形状和绿色的深浅。就我目前的感知而言，树木完全不同于屏幕。它们拥有惊人的分枝结构，有很多虫子。看了一两分钟后-最近我时常会有这种感觉-“我如梦初醒，光明涌入了眼帘”。