The Eyes Have It

The eye is the jewel of the body.
-Henry David Thoreau

I had dinner the other evening with a friend who has the most beautiful blue eyes.

There are other great things about him – he is one of the funniest people you will ever meet and he has a kind heart and a creative mind – but I got home this evening and found myself thinking, specifically, about eyes.

And about how much they define us.

This article (link above) was in the Post this week. It is a little (okay, a lot) disturbing to think about the prospects that this kind of medical advancement opens up. If doctors can “transplant a face” for reasons that seem well earned and worthy, what is to stop them from making this the next step of plastic surgery? You don’t like your face? Hell – get yourself a new one!

Will this woman’s friends recognize her? If all that remains of her original façade, is indeed, her eyes?

Sure they will.

Look at yourself in the mirror. Cover everything but the eyes. It is still, totally, absolutely, you. The Muslims are on to something I think, with their burqas and hijabs that reveal nothing but the eyes. And don’t get me wrong -- I am not by any means petitioning for the adoption of these get ups for the rest of the world. But there is some truth to the idea that a person’s eyes are still the most distinctive and expressive part of themselves.

Like snowflakes. No two alike.

There are all sorts of poetic statements about the eyes as the window to the soul. Corny as they may be, I think they are right on.

We meet someone and say, “They have kind eyes.” Or the reverse, “They have cold eyes”.

So much is expressed in the peepers.

Eyes clue in to our heritage. People have defined both my Eastern European and my Mediterranean roots based on my deep-set, almond shaped eyes. For years they bothered me. Rarely does a picture come back where I don’t look either very sleepy or stoned.

My brother used to make fun of my eyes - called them “Goonan Eyes” after a teacher we had whose eyes were extremely deep set and bulged out in a kind of thyroid problem way. Mine were never that bad but since those were the few years that my brother and I seemed intent on making the other as self-conscious as humanly possible (fortunately, we stopped doing this over a decade ago), the eyes were fair game.

I have an actor friend with big, expressive eye that grow to the size of saucers when he is expressing wonder or amazement. He jokes that when a director is trying to cast someone kind of crazy or a little bit “off” in a play, the eyes get him hired.

“Yeah, let’s call up that guy with the crazy big eyes.”

Any good photographer knows that the best portraits are the ones where they capture an honest and authentic expression in the eyes. In headshots, this is everything. Someone looks interesting, and consequently – interesting to work with - if there is something going on behind the eyes.

Another friend was given a name that translates, literally, to “pretty eyes”. And, lucky for him, they are.

But then, maybe all eyes are pretty in the eyes of the beholder.