Standard Deviations

5/13/2004. From a letter.

I too find that people are perfectly happy with unsharp images. After many years I concluded they just don't see the difference. Not necessarily optically – seeing being after all a brain function. Then again, most people don't see much at all. Few notice the poles and wires and transformers and such that make the American landscape so hideously ugly, but I always see them, just as I see the floaters and other artifacts of vision nobody notices. Maybe my brain just isn't good at smoothing or whatever brains do to hide irrelevant details. It's not pleasant. I'd be normal if I could.