by Do I know how to post the hard news or what? Like most writers these days, I have to be a very very careful spender. So when my sunglasses broke in several places and could not be repaired I worried about finding an affordable pair to replace them. I need prescription glasses so cheap pharmacy glasses were out of the question.
Warby Parker to the rescue. I got these for $150. A great thing about Warby Parker, for every pair of glasses sold they donate a pair to someone in need! How can they afford to do that, and what a wonderful thing. I’ll post pictures of them in action when I have them.
About the picture below. There are a number of stores in my neighborhood which sell insanely high priced handbags and display them like works of art, which many of them are actually. They’re just incredibly beautiful. I don’t like to carry bags actually, so I’m never tempted. But like a painting in a museum I know I will never possess, I still like to look!
I took this picture because this handbag store was a gallery previously! And before that a firehouse, after sitting abandoned for a long time. Except, maybe people were living in there at the time, I don’t know.
How much do you think those two bags in the window cost? Should we all make a guess and I’ll find out later and see how we did? I honestly don’t have a clue. I’m going to say … $500.
I say $1200 if they are in the window –
My husband has got several pairs of prescription glasses from http://www.39dollarglasses.com/ and he has been happy with most of them. He often pays more than $39 because he wants the coating or gets a pair of vari-focal lenses. But they ship fast and it seems to be easy.
I like the way you equate expensive handbags with art in a museum. Why not enjoy something beautiful just by looking at it? Why do we have to possess it too?
I have been analyzing Kant’s 3rd Critique and in the Analytic of the Beautiful, he gives a summary definition after each ‘Moment’. I have collected them here for your perusal:
1. “Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful.”
2. “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally.”
3. “Beauty is the form of purposiveness in an object, so far as this is perceived in it apart from the representation of an end.”
4. “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, is cognized as object of a necessary delight.”
He keep contradicting himself, or does he mean to describe different points of view? I don’t agree with with number 2.
I looked into $39dollarglasses. It got the most bad reviews on every site I’ve ever seen. I mean endless screens of complaints everywhere I looked. I’m sure it’s hit or miss, and I have such a simple prescription I may have had good odds.
Karen, I’m sure you’re right. I knew even as I typed $500 that I had to be WAY wrong. I have to stop in and ask when I’m not coming to or from swimming, when I look like a hobo.
Well sorry about $39 glasses! All I can tell you is that my husband has been happy with them. 🙁
As for Kant, he is a pretty interesting guy and says a LOT more than just those summaries. It’s a whole book on how the mind works when it makes judgments about the beautiful and the sublime – which are different things. Based on what we know about the mind today, his theories are pretty good for late 18th century. But it IS all translated from the old German that he used, and you do have to read the whole thing. I should have done a better job and summarized it myself.
The yellow purse looks like snakeskin – dyed, of course. If real snakeskin, I’ll say $799. If imitation, I’ll say $349. Not that I really have any idea whatsoever…
Julia, I could just be being dense!
Nora, I have to stop by and check!! Now I’m very curious.