The mirror is the problem of life that man must perpetually face.
—Rachilde (nom de plume—i.e., other persona—of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, 1860–1953)
1. Don’t take one for granted, ever.
2. Be careful of mirrors in winter, which is when they seem to have the most to tell, especially in an empty house (a house in some Midwestern state perhaps) during the late afternoon of February sunshine spreading on a blanket of even snow outside; it can get tricky when they reflect each other, the one in the upstairs hallway in an oaken frame telling something to the one similarly framed at the other end of that hallway, across the stairwell and its honey-varnished steps carpeted with Axminster (worn carpet that is patterned, faded red, in spots showing the burlap backing), yes, telling something that has to do with the reflection of a blue jay alighting from the limb of a pine outside a twelve-paned window in the hallway—the blue jay perched there and then suddenly in full flight, a puff of dusty snow from the bobbing spruce limb lingering as the bird is gone in a squawking swoop, both mirrors tossing the image back and forth, whispering about it there in the house, thoroughly empty.
3. Familiarize yourself with all the literary allusions you can concerning mirrors, just to be safe.
This includes any concerning Borges. And while Borges is often attributed with having said all there is to say on mirrors, Borges himself would always be the first to argue otherwise. Remember that Borges, who read Don Quixote when ten in English translation before he even approached it in Spanish, true, Borges in the span of his entire long life—from early manhood when he worked those long hours in the suburban library there in leafy Buenos Aires, wearily taking a yellow tram to the boring job every day, unknown then and his writing familiar only to those who followed the local Argentine literary magazines, to his very old age, when he was probably internationally celebrated more than any author had ever been celebrated, in person anyway, because with a new era of worldwide jet travel now established, there was Borges in a fine-cut British-tailored suit, blind, ever smiling, his companion/secretary, the gracious young María Kodama, leading him, Borges receiving honorary doctorates and orders of merit, Paris, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Cambridge (Mass.)—as said, Borges would always remind people that granting his lifelong fear/obsession when it came to mirrors and his own documentation of their ghostly doubling of us in so many of his stories, essays, and poems, he ultimately bowed to the essential truth about mirrors in literature: that everything that is to be said about them in literature had already been said in those few chapters about halfway through Don Quixote where noble Quixote himself, on horseback and with lance in hand, confronts the Knight of the Many Mirrors, whose armor itself is made of dangling reflectors, the Knight of the Many Mirrors also on horseback and with lance in hand.
4. And when it comes to literary allusions concerning mirrors, not only familiarize yourself with acknowledged masters like Borges and, indeed, Cervantes and their exploration of the subject, but don’t overlook Delmore Schwartz. Or, at least don’t overlook him physically, and it isn’t because of any special working with mirrors in his poetry or allusions to them in the handful of superb short stories he wrote (of course, his signature story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” is not a matter of mirrors, and the protagonist there is watching a movie of his doomed young parents’ lives unfolding on a Coney Island boardwalk, so a mirror really has nothing to do with it despite what anybody will tell you); and when it comes to Delmore Schwartz, look specifically at the jacket photo taken when he was a young man, a black-and-white studio pose from the 1930s, so arresting, which certainly could contend for being the all-time best jacket photo, even the hands-down winner in that category (nearly the “ur-jacket photo,” if you will, while allowing that the use of the rather pedantic ur isn’t part of your normal working vocabulary).
It is a confident Delmore Schwartz, only in his twenties, already teaching at Harvard, already celebrated by the likes of T. S. Eliot, no less, and how handsome he is with such high cheekbones, the steady lips, the sweep of wavy dark blond hair, the gray eyes looking right at the reflected and hauntingly penetrating gray eyes looking back. In a way, the photograph suggests more about writing and who the author really is than anything by any master far greater than Schwartz and who might have had something major to say about exactly that (remember that Schwartz’s output of work was comparatively small, he never did fully pay off on his promise; and with no eventual celebration of anything whatsoever later in life for Schwartz, he died at fifty-two in a dollar-a-day hotel room in Times Square, the Columbia Hotel to be exact; it happened one July night there in midtown Manhattan, the heat still wafting from the gummy asphalt streets, Schwartz—his wives and many girlfriends gone, his prestigious academic appointments gone, his old close friends like Saul Bellow who once loudly championed him gone, most of his sanity, in fact, gone, lonely Schwartz hallucinating that CIA agents were watching his every move, the man plagued with alcoholism and ongoing dementia by then in 1966—he suffered a massive heart attack while taking the garbage out to the hotel’s rickety iron fire escape, the broken, worry-ravaged body surrendering at last, though left unclaimed in the Bellevue Hospital morgue for three days, it has been noted): I mean, just look at that jacket photo, reprinted often over the years and recently turning up on the front cover of a collection of his journals.
5. But enough of that, and probably it is wiser to forget arming yourself with literary allusions relating to mirrors, because when everything is said and done, what is literature, anyway? What is it but something other than the real, which is to say, something other than what passes for our actual time on this planet, so brief and intangible, illusory, and everything, all of it, sometimes seems like just a, well . . . a . . . a . . .
But, to repeat, enough of that.
6. If you want to smash a mirror, do it at night, preferably on an empty beach, where as you slam the slab against a micasparkling rock set up for the purpose there, you will not hear the glassy crash of the shards, you will think it is just the sound of the waves, crested and rising black and veined with eerily white foam, as those waves roll and continually roll onto that beach.
7. And, if you want to smash a mirror, prove that it holds no dominion and convince yourself it’s merely, well, silvery, back-blackened glass—just stuff, just material, etc.—be sure you go to that beach alone at night, in early spring or late autumn, when the sand itself has drifted in undulating boomerang patterns, when the moon is at least near full and achingly incandescent, so that the shards of reflected moonlight on the sand seem like only the shards of broken glass; that way, you will not even have to see, let alone hear, that you have, in fact, smashed a mirror, and you will just see those shards that are reflecting the moonlight as being only so much of the rest of the profusion of direct, unreflected moonlight scattered on the sand.
8. Personal anecdote can become useful as well.
9. Accordingly, if talk of mirrors comes up in company, when one is at a gathering with a drink in hand and there is the low clatter of conversation all around, people standing and talking, a gallery opening or during the intermission of a play, be ready to have something to tell the others standing there (what if these people I don’t know very well suspect who I really am? what if my lies are of no use whatsoever in the end and they know the truth, they realize everything about me, you ask yourself, and who am I kidding? it is a gathering with svelte women in cocktail sheaths smelling of perfume, men in fine slacks and blazers, men so sure of themselves, so able and triumphant in life, the way other men can be), in such a gathering be able to recite like a memorized speech your own story of a mirror, or mirrors, to convince yourself you are in control, there’s nothing to be scared of.
10. For example, let’s say you are a man speaking:
“Mirrors? And now that you mention mirrors, here’s something that’s always stuck with me, what I will never forget. Young then, bounding around Europe with the mandatory backpack and youth hostel card, I was staying in a youth hostel in Madrid. Alas, what youth hostels in Spain were like back in those days, ancient Franco still in power and rigidly ruling in the assortment of almost comically spangled uniforms he wore, the caudillo and then some. Spain could seem uptight about everything then, including, and very emphatically, the sexual, being strictly Catholic. All the hostels were segregated as to sex, and staying there in the men’s hostel, I don’t know if any of us even knew where the women’s hostel was, if there actually was one. All guys, and this was in the early seventies, and one very odd thing about this hostel in Madrid, or outside of Madrid by the new university complex and where the first low foothills of the jagged sierra begins, was that they didn’t enforce the old rule saying you couldn’t stay more than three consecutive days in any youth hostel. I suspect that was because they needed the business, wanted to keep the dorm pretty full until the summer again, when the place, a big old villa of a house, wasn’t a hostel but a camp for Franco Youth or something—they brought in boys from all over the country for indoctrination, and there were formal portraits of grim, leering Franco everywhere in the place to remind you of that. Which meant that a lot of guys traveling got stuck there for weeks, settling in for a while, Americans and Canadians, guys who were tired of moving around, you know, tired of hitchhiking or taking lousy third-class trains, lugging a forty-pound backpack, even wondering what the hell they were doing in Europe to begin with and why they weren’t back home getting on with their lives now that they had finished college. And it was raining all the time, the way I remember it (speaking, you start to get nervous, you suspect that the people standing there and holding the drinks are already asking themselves where you are going with this, but you continue, you have no choice), and before long nobody seemed to even want to go into the city. There was a big, cheap lunch they served at the hostel, it was the high point of the day, so everybody, the rain falling outside, just lay around on the dorm bunks in the room with the lights turned off, constructing the day around the event. We lay there dressed in the morning’s dimness, reading, napping, waiting for that lunch they served, decent food and costing only a handful of pesetas or something, half a buck, and everybody, after lunch, just lay there on the dorm bunks some more, not saying much, napping, reading, just staring at the ceiling if you had the top bunk, just staring up at the mattress above you if you had the bottom one, thinking a lot—everybody was homesick, really, maybe missing pals, or missing more than ever a girlfriend, who now was probably dating another guy back in comfortable Chapel Hill or Ann Arbor or wherever, that sort of thing. Every afternoon this skinny guy wearing steel-rimmed glasses like two quarters shining would take out his guitar and sit on the edge of his bunk, he’d sing old Beatles songs and he’d sing them softly in his reedy voice, strumming the guitar, and all the songs, even the upbeat ones, were done real slow and real sad, songs like ‘Michelle’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘I’m Looking Through You.’ In the dimness, the rain outside continuing to fall steadily and looking lavender, which rain sometimes can, dripping off the tile roof of the hostel as we all lay there, he’d tune up the strings in between numbers, then go right into another Beatles song, nobody saying anything, just getting sadder and sadder, surely, everybody there on the bunks more and more homesick. And I remember once when he did pause for a while, didn’t start into a next song right away, he finally said, ‘Anybody got a request?’ but nobody said anything, we all quietly lay there with no lights on, dressed on the beds in the afternoon—a room not even properly heated, rather cold, dank—and he asked it again, ‘A request?’ And there was a big bearded guy, solid as a linebacker, a vet from the U.S. Army, actually, who once he was discharged from his base in Germany had apparently decided that he, too, would take the backpacking grand tour around Europe like other guys his age. His voice was deep, gravelly, and in the silence, the rain still dripping off the roof, gurgling along the gutters and into the downspouts, he simply and flatly said from his bunk, lying there wearing his army surplus jacket and with his hands behind his head, he said, ‘Yeah I’ve got a request—will you just shut the fuck up before I kill myself.’ It was perfect, that line of his (but you notice there isn’t any laughter at that, the anecdote is going all wrong, you were supposed to be talking about mirrors and you know that everybody else, their smiles frozen, they’re all looking at you, staring, you’d better get moving if you hope to salvage this), so, anyway, there were these two particular guys staying at the hostel, bona fide hippies, or stoners, even if we didn’t use that word back then. They seemed to see Madrid as good a place as any to recuperate for a while after living in some commune way down south in Morocco, where they’d smoked themselves out of what was left of their mushy gourds, so much available kif in Morocco, guys who wore ratty djellabas they’d bought in Morocco and who didn’t seem to care that all over Franco’s Spain you’d see giant placards, red on white, announcing loudly that the possession of any illegal substance was punishable by sizable prison sentences. They just kept smoking, and unlike the rest of us they just kept going into the city every day, taking the Metro to the Prado specifically. And even more specifically, they headed straight to the one room where the museum displayed, on its own, Las Meninas, what could be Velásquez’s greatest masterpiece (no, this isn’t going well at all, this relating of the anecdote, and then out of nervousness the man who is apparently telling the story, you, your stomach no more than a nest of slithering lime-green baby grass snakes, you try to make the point that you thought you were heading for, salvage the anecdote: you tell how the Velázquez painting shows the little princess, six years old or so, angelically blond, surrounded by her ladies in waiting, the meninas, as well as a female court dwarf in a frilled courtier’s dress that’s almost a parody of the attire of a lady in waiting, plus there’s a sleepy brown German shepherd stretched out amid them; you tell how it is a large canvas easily ten feet high, in an ornate gold frame; you tell how when you were young and in Spain, it was considered so important by the museum that it was set prominently catty-corner in its own gallery and it was a gallery that had, for added effect, completely black walls; and in the painting there is so much else going on, with Velázquez himself depicted in the painting off to one side and at his large easel in this palace chamber with the assembled young court, the princess and her entourage, who are looking out at what he is painting in this painting; and a mirror on the far back wall of the enormous chamber—with its lofty ceiling and the whole place decorated with other canvases—reflects the faces of the king and queen themselves, the subjects posing for Velázquez and the painting he is working on; and right beside the mirror in back, very strangely, a man in courtier’s garb of tights and jerkin and a complicated ruff collar is shown about to walk out and leave through a large carved mahogany door at the top of some steps, there always having been the argument on whether he is a royal deputy or possibly, again, Velázquez—as another self, now with shorter hair, a trimmed beard—and, therefore, it is the painter suggesting that while he is painting he can enter in and exit from his own painting, meaning his own imagination, anytime that he wants to, as you stoke up some courage now, try to work up to the punch line, or at least get to the point of the anecdote, keeping on with the story), I had seen the painting, and in the opposite corner in that gallery in the Prado, across from the painting, also set catty-corner, was a full-length mirror. It was there supposedly to prove that the perspective of the painting was perfect, and that to view it reflected in the mirror was for the canvas itself—that life-size palace chamber depicted and those life-size people in it—to definitely appear alive, three-dimensional, even. But what these two stoners did was take it a step beyond that, and they actually found the equivalent of a five-and-ten, like a Woolworth’s, in central Madrid, and they bought these cheap shaving mirrors, I guess that’s what they were, and every day they went to the Prado, which was free back then. They went maybe to keep warm, or at least warmer than in the ill-heated hostel, but they also went to repeatedly carry out another mission more important. So, having first chemically primed themselves, some extensive quality time spent enjoying a few jumbo joints, they proceeded to the black-walled gallery, wearing their ridiculous djellabas—you know, the coarse, brown-and-white striped wool getups as long as droopy bath-robes and hooded, the kind they used to sell to all hippies for about five bucks all over Morocco, a mandatory purchase—and what they did in that gallery that was usually empty, seeing it was the tourist off-season, what they worked on every day, was positioning themselves for good reflection in the big mirror set catty-corner that way in the gallery, and then, that reflection achieved, they somehow put themselves, as reflected in that big mirror, into reflections in the shaving mirrors, turning the handheld things this way and that, to finally transport their own images right into the painting’s scene of the palace chamber along with everybody else therein portrayed. I remember the guys once came back to the hostel at the end of the day and in their slow, hippie, soporifically relaxed style they told the rest of us how good a day indeed it had been, completely productive, saying to us things like, ‘Man, I was right in there with the bunch of them, wild, I spent most of my time today talking to that little dwarf in her crazy party dress, a real trip she was.’ To be honest, I guess I’ll never forget those guys, they were something else.”
(Still no laughter, the story turned out entirely wrong, you never should have told it, and you are more sure than ever now that the subject of mirrors is not one to raise in casual company, and what were you thinking, bringing up an anecdote about mirrors like that, trying to ward off the fact that mirrors do have the power they do, or your mocking such power?)
Actually, maybe avoid anecdotes about mirrors.
11. But once it has started, there’s probably no stopping it.
Because there is a beautiful woman among those who have been listening, or, to put it another way, those others pretending to listen, as you went on—and on. And now you see, or imagine, that she is looking right at you while the group continues to stand there. She has been listening, and how captivatingly svelte she is in her black cocktail sheath, how lovely are her hazel eyes, fringed with incipient crow’s-feet, her mane of mahogany hair, full yet admittedly not as lustrous as that of a college girl—she is no longer young, true, but a bit older now, she has entered into another, maybe more beautiful time in life, which makes that beauty especially riveting, very womanly and more alluring still. She starts talking. She doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that the others were obviously bored by the anecdote you told, she doesn’t seem to care about any of those others, the equally svelte (if not as strikingly beautiful) women around her, plus the successful-in-life, sure-of-themselves men, all with drinks in hand, and she just responds with an anecdote of her own, it seems, in order to try to render herself brave, to possibly ward off the power of mirrors, too, as she talks of mirrors.
Her voice is whispery, intense in its softness but whispery (breathy?), nevertheless.
“Mirrors,” she says, as if the twin syllables, somehow hollow, have half hypnotized her, and all that is left is to let the other self that isn’t her—but that is her—continue to speak: “Mirrors,” she repeats it, with the same softness. And begins, stating the truth of the matter outright:
“My father, very handsome, very dignified, was a supremely rational man. He was a lawyer and then a judge, he was a presidential elector from our state three times, actually knew Kennedy on a first-name basis. There was little he couldn’t do, and concerning his many talents it wasn’t Kennedy that would come to mind, it was Jefferson himself, with the clichéd label of Renaissance man aptly applied at last, to describe my father, anyway. And when there was constitutional reform in our state right after World War Two, he close to single-handedly rewrote that document of governance almost as a philosophical tract, it later being hailed as a template for clear and logical thinking, lucid political insight, by those in other states when it came time for them to undertake constitutional reform as well. Also, my father had always promised my mother he would someday build her a summer house, my mother who as a girl loved to swim in the ocean, and eventually he made good on the promise. You have to understand that he didn’t have very much interest in a summer house himself. He never went to the beach, his work was his sole genuine concern, and even when the house did get built and we were all so happy there during the sun-splashed ongoing dream that July and August could inevitably be for our family, we knew that his idea of weekend relaxing was simply to sit out on a lawn chair and read maybe a biography of some significant world leader, with his idea of casual clothes being his suit pants and mesh summer wingtips and a starched white dress shirt, the collar now open and the sleeves carefully rolled up. Understandably pleased that he had given his family the fine summer home, he was nevertheless only waiting for Saturday to metamorphose into Sunday, then Sunday to soon give way to Monday morning, when he could get back to the city, his law work and also fighting the good fight of the Democratic State Committee. But in true Jeffersonian spirit, he didn’t employ an architect to design the house out on the grassy point with a picture-perfect view of a lighthouse on the peninsula across the bay—it was a sizable plot of land, the several seaside lots he had bought up quite reasonably, also right after the war—and he designed the house entirely on his own. In the evening he worked on sketches and made detailed plans on big sheets of crisp draftsman’s paper spread out on the large dining room table in our winter house in the city, marking exterior details and the layout of the rooms, then he constructed models of the successive proposed designs. He worked his way through a half dozen, made them out of shirt cards. He placed them one after another on the folded-down music shelf of the grand piano in our living room, right next to the red John Thompson–method books we’d all learned to play from as children, leaving each model there for a week or so to get response from my mother and us kids, see what we thought. The final product was a fine balance of the new and the old—single-story and low-slung and wonderfully sprawling for the many rooms, but all of it with proper New England rooflines and good wood shingles that eventually weathered tastefully dark brown, and all of it with the two long porches and endless windows. You know, my brother and sisters and I used to laugh about that, his concern for windows, and he was forever talking ‘fenestration’ then, that was his big word, a delightful and suitably airy noun when you think of it, fenestration, definitely a favorite of his (you are listening, you are looking right at her and she is looking right at you while she speaks, and who cares if the others do appear as bored by her slow-moving anecdote as they were by yours, perhaps the bunch of them hoping that the buzzing bell will sound for the next act, if it is during a play intermission, or that somebody will call those assembled in the gallery to move to the next room for some words by a preening, self-satisfied artist if it is an art opening, and suddenly you seem to sense that she, well, knows, and, more important, you know that she knows and that she knows that you know, and she continues, you could listen to her for a lifetime, or, better, a couple of lifetimes, even a spacious eternity as big as the ever-expanding, star-cluttered, resonatingly ebony unlimitedness that is the universe itself—get the idea?—as she keeps speaking), but all that rationality abandoned my father when it came to mirrors. You see, it was well known in our family that my father could never sleep in a room from which he could see a mirror, he harbored an undeniable irrationality about that within him, lifelong. My mother didn’t like to talk about it much, but she confided to me that it was true, always had been true, and in our house in the city the Chippendale furniture in their master bedroom had to be arranged a certain way, so that from where he slept there would be no glancing over at any point in the course of waking in the night and having himself reflected in the long mirror over the fine brass-handled dresser, a mirror somewhat tarnished with age, admittedly, the dresser and the mirror attached to it being a prized heirloom in my mother’s family and the finish having gone iridescent in places, dull, like maybe silverware stored away in a drawer for years. The same went for hotels. My mother once told me, or again confided in me, that if my father had to travel to other cities and other states, for a meeting or to deliver a speech, he would always book into a good hotel in the city, and once escorted to the room he would always have the bellboys—in maybe green uniforms with gold epaulets, or maroon uniforms with gold epaulets, you know—he would have the bellboys work to tug and drag and tug some more all the furniture, until they had it positioned right, so during the night—horns sounding from the streets below in the strange city, people talking lowly outside the door as they moved down dimly lit halls in a hotel room in the course of a shadowy night in the strange city—so he could assure himself, now in the hotel room, that he was sleeping and also that there was no chance of him being reflected while he was sleeping (you are enraptured, you have never met a woman like this before, the soft voice and those hazel eyes, flecked with darker brown like autumn leaves, the dab of lipstick on her front teeth that is exactly right in itself, perfect, a saving flaw, something you ask yourself if you might have encountered somewhere in a dream, and she continues speaking), which means that in the end it wasn’t so much an issue of him seeing a mirror that spooked him, it was, of course, the mirror seeing him and doing so while he was dreaming, because what are dreams? In truth, are they only reflections of reflections, as the shuffled pack of cards that constitute the events of our daytime lives, it will be nothing more than a reshuffled pack of cards once the night and its darkness comes, once sleep with its many dreams also comes, no? And—now that I think of it, what I just said—do you ever wonder about something like those playing cards that we take for granted, how even in some entity simple and everyday like that, there is an ultimate conundrum, a telling futility, the usual playing cards showing a repeated red patterning of pudgy little angels, cherubic, on antique wide-tire bicycles happily riding along, the cards themselves absurd enough by definition to make you want to give up on everything if you dwell too much on them, admit that nothing adds up to anything, all is hopeless, which you’ve probably always realized and know deep down (she suddenly looks quite scared herself, much more frightened than even you were when you were reciting your own anecdote about mirrors, an anecdote that seemed to be going nowhere, that seemed to cause those others to stare at you more, and she continues speaking), and I suppose the more I think of it, and I do often think of it, I now know that for me (she does try to force a laugh, a hesitant jangle in that whisperiness, she even tries to force a smile, but the left corner of her mouth isn’t steady, it’s twitching some, and there is that embarrassing speck of lurid ruby lipstick on her very white teeth, she is faltering, visibly straining), and I suppose that for me . . . I suppose . . . I . . .”
Her voice trails off.
12. Oh, how you long to tell this woman you have now encountered, by absolute chance, so many things.
13. Oh, how you want her to know what maybe nobody else knows, what you have never told anybody, including the two (or three?) wives along the way, the grown children off on their own somewhere on the West Coast (one of them now in Santa Cruz, or is it Santa Barbara?) who seldom as much as occasionally phone you lately.
You want to tell her how you were obsessed with Delmore Schwartz when you were in college, and while other English majors became predictably obsessed with Joyce or Faulkner or Virginia Woolf, for you, for some reason, it was always Delmore Schwartz. You must have read “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” dozens of times, a moving, perfectly crafted short story, you kept thinking about a particular jacket photo of him, you studied it, dreamed of it (did the photo become more important than the writing?), as you hoped to someday be a writer yourself, fluent in allusions about other writers, triumphant with writing itself—yet none of that ever came close to working out, of course, it was inevitable you ended up in what is euphemistically, and somewhat very tragically, called the business world. And you long to tell her something else, tell her what you never have been able to tell anybody, how even this many years after your own mother died—it happened when you were a fragile fourteen, a happy enough kid before that with an old flap-hinged first baseman’s glove you oiled with neat’s-foot nightly, a kid who used on your brush cut back then a gunk they called Butch Wax that came in an orange push-up dispenser—you still have a recurrent dream of the mirrors trading reflectons with each other in the modest house where you grew up in the Midwest, where your mother showed only kindness to you, only unmitigated love; and in the dream it is winter, there is a blue jay on the limb of a tall pine outside the hallway window, from which it suddenly alights, a squawk, then a graceful, ascending swoop, and in the upstairs hallway of the house, empty, the mirrors seem to be saying to each other what couldn’t be said outright in such emptiness of a long-forgotten winter day, and . . . and . . .
14. But what’s the use, right? Because there is no lovely woman telling her anecdote, there is no exchange of anecdotes about mirrors at any gathering either, because . . .
15. . . . because. . . because . . . be . . .
OK, let me try a different tack.
16. (also # 6.) If you want to smash a mirror, do it at night, preferably on an empty beach, where as you slam the slab against a mica-sparkling rock set up for the purpose there, you will not hear the glassy crash of the shards, you will think it is just the sound of the waves, crested and rising black and veined with eerily white foam, as those waves roll and continually onto that beach.
17. (also # 7.) And, if you want to smash a mirror, prove that it holds no dominion, convince yourself it’s merely, well, silvery, back-blackened glass—just stuff, just material, etc.—be sure you go to that beach alone and at night, in early spring or late autumn, when the sand itself has drifted in undulating boomerang patterns, when the moon is at least near full and achingly incandescent, so that the shards of reflected moonlight on the sand seem like only the shards of broken glass; that way, you will not even have to see, let alone hear, that you have, in fact, smashed a mirror, and you will just see those shards that are reflecting the moonlight as being only so much of the rest of the profusion of direct, unreflected moonlight scattered on the sand.
18. In other words, be careful of mirrors. Very careful.
19. Don’t ever take one for granted.