Who isn’t awakened by something new!  Today – two days ahead of schedule – my new prescription sunglasses arrived at Heritage Optometric Clinic on Lansdowne Avenue in Carleton Place. I was sent an early morning email notification to which I instantly responded. And as quickly I was able to arrange an appointment to collect them this afternoon.

It has been years since I have purchased a new pair of prescription sunglasses. The reason has nothing to do with sunglasses. Nor has it anything to do with economy.  Instead the disinclination arises from the lenses of both my eyes having been replaced several years ago.  The expectation at the time of the surgery (which proved correct) was that I would have 20/20 distance vision but still be required to have reading glasses.  As a result I ended purchasing a variety of sunglasses off the shelf without any prescription because predominantly I used sunglasses for driving or when cycling.  I could thus bear the deprivation of a prescription for distance or magnification for reading.

This account is a poor introduction to the larger and equally shameful theme of materialism and retail which of course are the seams of Christmas.  Say what you will, there is an exceedingly popular tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.  This is so notwithstanding “they hated the sinful materialism of the wicked city“.  I will not attempt to defeat or exonerate the plausability of that theorem by asserting the philosophic doctrine that “nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications” or “the doctrine that consciousness and will are wholly due to material agency“. If, as I have so often boldly projected in the face of religiosity, life on this planet ends like that of any insect, I will not blanch the sanguinity of my doctrine by postulating that there is anything other than the material world. In essence I am caught in a logical subterfuge from which there is but one escape; namely, run with it!

The attraction of prescription sunglasses has of late regained ground. My distance vision has deteriorated. As it turns out I had a pair of RayBan sunglasses which I had purchased not long after my eye surgery several years ago. I hadn’t worn them much lately because my distance prescription changed and they suffered the lack of reading magnification (which I have since decided is preferable even for driving if I wish to read the dashboard). So I congratulated myself for my sparsity by not having to pay for another pair of frames – though of course there was the cost of the prescriptions (which, should you care to know, was $799).

It is a happy consequence of aging that one’s material aspirations dwindle.  While I preserve my undisputed mirth from the mere contemplation of a new ship’s bell or a Holt Renfrew brooch or an acrylic painting of a seascape, the governing reality now is that I’ve done it all before. And to be honest we haven’t any more room for or need of a clock, brooch or seascape.

Sadly however it is this irrelevance which poisons what once was a digestible and highly diverting consumption. And while you may surmise that the profitability is an unwitting reward it is but a token compensation. Speaking as an inveterate profligate and Hedonist I freely acknowledge that the deprivation outweighs the parsimony.

All this is a mottled way of askng, when the allure of things is removed, then what? What’s left? Wherein lies the strength, the surge, the magic, the ambition?

I have for the moment concluded by way of temporary retreat from this lamented alteration that the view from my drawing room seat is unmatched. There isn’t a morning I don’t find myself muttering, “Oh my!” upon catching a first glimpse of the yellow splashed landscape.

But the greater more disturbing realization is that of our ancients; viz., Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; while the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: in the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble.

I have always commented that death is a dreadful subject.  But I must confess that the destiny of old age holds its own.