Accomplice!, the blizzard, and the Weston house (pp. 948–949)
Himself had sat in a spindle-backed chair, at the same living-room window C.T. now uses for advanced worry, and aimed a series of nondigital cameras at the mounting snow. After years in which his consuming obsession was the establishment of E.T.A., Orin said, Himself had started in [p. 949] with the film-obsession almost immediately after the Academy was up and running. […] Himself had seemed interested mostly in the lenses and rasters [n.380] at first, and in the consequences of their modification. […] From military optics to annular optics to entrepreneurial optics to tennis-pedagogy to film. […] The inside of the case was striated with lenses down both sides. He used to let Mario and me put different lenses in our eyes and squint to hold them, imitating Schtitt.
Context
The plan's "rasters" one-liner: Hal's memory of the '98 blizzard is the origin scene of the film career, and it begins not with stories or actors but with instruments — nondigital cameras aimed at snow, a leather case striated with lenses, and an interest in "the lenses and rasters… and the consequences of their modification" (n.380's raw sits outside this theme's targets). Hal then gives the canonical obsession-chain in five links — "From military optics to annular optics to entrepreneurial optics to tennis-pedagogy to film" — the same one-sentence career that 020's obituary and Marathe's dossier-recital (098) carry, here from inside the family. And the tenderest optics image in the theme: the little sons squinting to hold the auteur's lenses in their eyes, playing at being Schtitt — children literally trying on the father's ways of seeing (reading inferred; the raw gives the game).