If we think about mirrors, occasionally, we aren’t alone. Mirrors often find a metaphorical place in literature, in philosophy, lyrics. Mirrors are always good for introducing an element of surreality into everything.
In a recent post I said this about mirrors:
We’re always searching for an un-laterally inverted mirror image of ourselves, someone who
thinks, feels, acts the same as us. The idea being that such a person will
really understand us. But mirror images are trapped behind glass, you see them,
but do they see you? They cease to exist as soon as you walk away from the
mirror, don’t they?
I am amazed now that an answer to the question I invented emerged rather eerily and fictitiously in Haruki Murakami’s novel – After Dark. In this book where Murakami, as always, expertly isolates the threads of surreality woven through our subconscious, mirror images trapped behind glass do appear to see you and do NOT cease to exist as soon as you walk away from the mirror. They linger after you’ve left, watching, scanning the empty room with their eyes.
Just one of those strange coincidences where a month or so after I append a rhetorical question to a ruminative piece of writing, I pick up a book of fiction where a writer has already invented an imaginative answer to my question. Almost as eerily strange as the novel itself.
Just finished reading another book which dealt in doubles and parallel universes. The book was called The Man Who Turned into Himself – a stunning 1994 debut novel from David Ambrose. Mirrors are a part of this story as well, a story that fictionalizes certain aspects of theoretical physics. We deal with many worlds and parallel universes here in a plot that engages us till the very end.
How many more mirrors are coming my way?
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