The Dragonfly

THE DRAGONFLY
    Once an ophthalmologist had some good news and some bad news for a dragonfly.
    “Which do you want first?” the doctor asked, noting a look of apprehension on the dragonfly’s face.
    “Give me the bad news first, I guess,” the dragonfly answered after an awkward pause spent trying to decide whether it would be better to accept the worst for what it was or to hold out hope for an end finally to the splitting headaches that had plagued it for so long.
    “Well, the bad news is the headaches you complain of are indeed brought on by your eyes.”
    So it was true, the dragonfly sighed to itself. These thousands of facets to each eye, keenly sensitive to every turn of light and every motion, these windows thrown open to life and all the longing glances life casts on itself, was there no escape from the strain of taking it all in, of marking every fascination that wide nature held?
    “The good news is we can do something about that.”
    Then there was hope? “Can you really do something for me, doctor?”
    “Yes, but the surgical procedure entails risk and some cost in terms of time, you must understand.”
    “Risk and cost in time?”
    “The risk is that a patient may go totally blind, though this happens very rarely.”
    The dragonfly again took some time in considering this statement, particularly what the “very” in “very rarely” might mean, before asking, “And the potential cost in time?”
    “If the procedure is successful, you’ll leave with your head in bandages, but after a while those can come off and the pain will be gone.”
    “Completely?”
    “In most cases that’s been the final result. With two new eyes, much smaller and relocated to the front of your head, the visual overload you’ve experienced will be very nearly eliminated. Instead of having to deal with the full sweep of the world, you’ll only need to concern yourself with that portion of it directly in front of you and can ignore the rest. Plus, with a pair of eyelids now, you’ll always be able to close out entirely whatever you don’t wish to see, even if it does happen to be directly in front of you.”
    The dragonfly considered the mosaic of tiny doctors floating before it in the examination room and tried to imagine what seeing a single giant one would be like. With its multifold angles of vision suddenly cut down to a single focus, how much of what had been the spellbinding bounty of life that surrounded it on all sides could it hope to take in anymore?
    Observing the dragonfly’s renewed hesitation, the ophthalmologist said by way of encouragement, “Seems like a small price to pay for an end to these headaches of yours.”
    Was it a “small price?” the dragonfly wondered. Should it go ahead with this proposed remedy seemingly based on a confidence that what one saw before one was all that mattered and that peripheral concerns were just that—peripheral—and thus considered a distraction? Was the dragonfly ready to settle for this in place of myriad variations in an all-embracing vision, with not one superior to all the others and thus not one omitted.
    The dragonfly eyed all the tiny doctors floating before it again and tried to imagine the pair of post-surgical lenses it would have to rely on for the sole view of its future world. 
    “No offense intended,” it finally replied as it set its wings in motion and headed straight towards all of the numberless doors out of the room, “but I think I’ll put up with the pain as long as I can.”