Mirror me, mirror you

Mirrors are fascinating, as well as sometimes horrifying, depending on what we hope to see. Simple idea: clear glass with a reflective back. Yet we can lose ourselves in a mirror. Mirrors double the size of rooms. They are double rooms, showing us life opposite. There’s double the number of books and chairs and clutter and dust. There’s our double, too.


Mirrors change the rules: Alice fell into a mirror, and her world turned Wonderland upside down, even more than when she tumbled into that rabbit hole in her first trip. For a child, the room’s double reflected in a mirror can be a magical place where things are the same and yet not the same. The rooms we see in mirrors are mysterious, with even more hidden beyond their walls and windows.

We use the mirror to comb our hair, straighten our tie, and then suddenly one day when we look at the mirror: we see ourselves. We look into a mirror, searching for something as we reel from the shock of an event, and there in the silver rectangle confronting us, is someone who feels just the same as we do inside, someone whose look of bewilderment confirms our confusion. We look in the mirror to affirm the placement of our ego: and are instead troubled at what we see. We see what used to be us, the same image reflected back from the mirror for five or ten or twenty years, until a comment (“You’ve gone gray lately”) sends us back to the mirror with fresh eyes for another look. It’s not a coincidence that the potential scales on our eyes and the backs of mirrors both shine.

Mirrors reflect life events. How many people looked at themselves in this washroom mirror, on the way to class, to an interview, back to the school dance? How much of their experience, whether or anticipation or fear, still wriggles beneath its surface? If we could look into that experience, what the mirror has seen, what would we see and who would look back at us? Narcissus fell in love with himself; so do teenagers, when they’re not despairing at their reflections.

Mirrors let us scry, looking into the past or the future. We suspend our knowledge of what we will see, and look at what is there. The best mirrors for scrying are old ones, their silver clouded in places, perhaps splotched, maybe crazed (like the people looking into them) – but old mirrors hold old memories. Whose image has been reflected, whose image caught in the glass.

Mirrors mimic water, just as water mirrors the world: the perfect photo with trees above, and water-reflected trees at their feet. The sea and the sky are two blue plates mirroring each other, between which we live.

Like the moon, mirrors are mostly silver and reflect light. They’re not light sources, but they are the source of our frequent enlightenment.

There’s the mirror in the oven window (behind which we see bread baking or a roast simmering in juice); the mirror in the frame; the mirror which can be flat glass or beveled with that extra angle giving the reflection value and depth.

People mirror us back to ourselves, if we choose to notice. Sometimes we don’t want to see, and sometimes they don’t want to see what we project (or think we project) about them. Even so, how people treat us can be how they perceive we mirror ourselves.

There’s an awful (and awe-full) lot to find in mirrors.