On Knowing One Another

Extract

A young boy found one of Beck's best stereoscopes, but he did not understand its use. When he looked through the two eye-pieces at the two adjacent duplicates (nearly) of each picture on each card he got a single flat picture, and he expected nothing more. Then the moment of revelation came. As he fumbled the focus onto a flat picture of Hamlet, the grave-diggers and Hamlet himself bulged out, the skull on Hamlet's palm looked like a museum piece, and the grave yawned like a real pit. The stereoscopic world of the Beck instrument had been suddenly established in the boy's experience.