optometrically

Better, and more convincingly "futuristic," are the narrator's soliloquies on the blue-to-red shift and the eventual implosion of the known universe near the book's end, and this would be among the novel's highlights, too, if it weren't for the fact that Turnbull is interested in cosmic apocalypse only because it serves as a grand metaphor for his own personal death-likewise all the Housmanesque descriptions of the optometrically significant "Year 2020," and the book's final, heavy description of "small pale moths [that] have mistakenly hatched" on a late-autumn day and now "flip and flutter a foot or two above the asphalt as if trapped in a narrow wedge of space-time beneath the obliterating imminence of winter."

John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists? 1997