Review: The Possibilities Of Invention By Cathy Song
655 Words3 Pages
Reality of Illusions
There is a fine balance between illusion and reality in a person’s life that many struggle to find. Often times an individual will choose to ignore reality completely by creating illusions of how they would prefer the world to be; this is significant because the illusions they create are often much more appealing, however the escape is only temporary and they need to face reality eventually. In the poem The Possibilities of Invention by Cathy Song the author chooses to ignore reality by not wearing her glasses. In doing so she can invent the world as she would like to see it, however she needs her glasses to function in the real world and in the times when she wears her glasses it forces her to give up her illusions and see the world as it truly is. There is a prolonged conflict between needing to wear her glasses and wanting to invent the world as she would like…show more content… It is because of these problems that she often chooses not to wear her glasses, opening her up to “the possibilities of invention” that her near blind illusions have to offer (40). She prefers the “whirling blue of the nearly blind” where there are endless possibilities of how she chooses to see the world (34, 35). Her choice to ignore reality, like her glasses, is only temporary. There is dramatic irony in that her vision is “a correctable situation” that she would rather not fix, as she doesn’t want to see the problems in the world any more than she is required to (15). Her vision may be curable but the world itself is not. She knows what the world is like when it is seen with good vision, so she ignores reality as much as possible by not wearing her glasses. The problem with not wearing her glasses is that she compromises her ability to function in the