Maybe One Day We’ll Look in the Mirror

Samantha Harvey, Orbital (New York: Grove Press, 2023), p. 28:

Maybe one day we’ll look in the mirror and be happy with the fair-to-middling upright ape that eyes us back, and we’ll gather our breath and think: OK, we’re alone, so be it. Maybe that day is coming soon. Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace. Until then what can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there? To become superb in our technology, knowledge and intellect, to itch with a desire for fulfilment that we can’t quite scratch; to look to the void (which still isn’t answering) and build spaceships anyway, and make countless circlings of our lonely planet, and little excursions to our lonely moon and think thoughts like these in weightless bafflement and routine awe. To turn back to the earth, which gleams like a spotlit mirror in a pitch-dark room, and speak into the fuzz of our radios to the only life that appears to be there. Hello? Konnichiwa, ciao, zdraste, bonjour, do you read me, hello?

The World is a Stage

Before the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved. To such a world the convention of perspective was unnecessary. To such a world other conventions of visual reproduction, such as the nimbus and the halo, were as appropriate as to ours they are not. It was as if the observers were themselves in the picture. Compared with us, they felt themselves and the objects around them and the words that expressed those objects, immersed together in something like a clear lake of – what shall we say? – of ‘meaning,’ if you choose. It seems the most adequate word. Aquinas’s verbum intellectus was tanquam speculum, in quo res cernitur—‘like a mirror in which the object is discerned.’

Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, 2nd edn (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988; 1957), pp. 94-95.

Memory is not What the Heart Desires

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Rings (London: HarperCollins, 2007; 1954), p. 493:

Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror, be it clear as Kheled-zâram.

The World is a Looking-glass

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair or, A Novel without a Hero (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, n.d.; 1847-1848), p. 12:

The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.  Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.

All Mirrors are Magic Mirrors

All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass.

George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1858), p.114.

Readers

Aristophanes, Birds, 1448-49:

ὑπὸ γὰρ λόγων ὁ νοῦς τε μετεωρίζεται
ἐπαίρεταί τ᾿ ἄνθρωπος.

by words the mind is uplifted and the person elevated.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, F100:

Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, wenn ein Affe hineinsieht,
so kann kein Apostel heraus gucken.

A book is a mirror: when a monkey looks in,
   no Apostle stares back.

Notes:
My translations.