"The top half is the teacher but the lower half is the sadist."
—Reinhard Heydrich on a photo of Heinrich Himmler in uniform
There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a crescendo of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme's eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men. Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too frightful to see.
A pair of shiny lenses, perched on the bridge of a serial killer’s nose, becomes a subtle metaphor for his walled-off nature, for her sociopath’s aloofness. Glasses become a mask that’s acceptable for the killer to wear in public. They become a threat, too: After all, the serial killer who wears glasses is apparently someone who can see us better than we can see them. Someone who’s always watching.
— Racked.com, "Why Do We Think Serial Killers All Wear the Same Glasses?
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"Alex remembers the Wizard's searching gaze, arctic blue behind the slab-like lenses of his glasses, his intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic.
—Fairyland, by Paul J McAuley
