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From "Damon Runyon's America", collected in "Letter from America" by Alistair Cooke:
I'm a four-star veteran of the battle with astigmatism. I remember how, at my first dances as a boy, when I didn't know there was anything wrong with my eyes, I would look across the ballroom floor and see a whole lot of misty, tender wallflowers swooning on the vine. I would slink madly round the edge of the dancers to grab one of these houris for my very own. However, when I came within 3 feet of the charmer I had singled out to trend on, I saw at once why she was a wallflower, instead of being, say, Ava Gardner, out there on the floor moving like a snowflake, - to be frank - doing the Charleston. When I got close she was rarely (really) a beauty, though she looked human enough and surely had character; but that was unfortunately not what a 15-year-old is looking for in girls. I used to take a quick, mild dislike to these girls, however, because they seemed to have pulled a Jekyll-and-Hyde trick. I discovered from some patient clinical testing later that this is the characteristic deceit of astigmatism. Almost any attractive woman at 30 yards looks to me like a beauty, because the astigmatic gaze softens the hard vertical lines, irons out all the wrinkles, and turns any deep-set pair of eyes into pits of tenderness. In general, the great gift of astigmatism is to rob a face of its peculiar lapses from the ideal and leave you with the Platonic copy of the girl that is laid up in heaven.
