The Man from Glad and the mattress (pp. 495–496)
This was also when I became aware that even the reading lamps were on in the daylit room, because a faint square of direct lamplight, its four sides rendered slightly concave by the distortion of projection, appeared on the white ceiling above the skewed cube.
Context
A wrenched reading lamp, and the narrator can't describe it without optics: the accident registers as a projected image on the ceiling, sides "rendered slightly concave by the distortion of projection." Pure JOI vocabulary decades before the career — the memoir's prose itself is the evidence that this narrator sees light as apparatus (inferred framing; the raw gives only the sentence).