Why do automobile sun visors come equipped with vanity mirrors?

I had a friend, DW, who passed in a most usnusual manner. Well, maybe not unusual for him. He was 89, a good fiddle player (and maker!), thrower of two great parties per year, and starting to have lots of vision problems. One September day he decided to travel out in his backyard to “help out” while some men were pulling down a tree which was in a potentially threatening location for his home’s roof. And the timing was off, and they didn’t notice, and the huge tree came down on his head.

He used to tell me, 19 years his younger or so, how he no longer recognized himself in the mirror. And he did it with humor. He thought it funny, but true; it genuinely surprised him. Thing is, for me, I only met him and knew him for about a decade. So I do not know what he looked like in his prime, or youth. Or when he was a CEO of a company that made precision equipment out of layered wood and other materials. But my view of him was such that he was wonderful. Visually in a way too. But beyond all that. I knew him as a conversationalist. A good person to reflect upon the world with on a winter’s afternoon with tea. Sometimes, as a walking companion in the vast wildlands behind his house, with showshoes, on a trail he created himself over a span of decades. He would comment upon the animal tracks we passed, and he knew all their species. He knew what week of the spring or summer certain wildflowers normally became visible. I could see DW just fine, though I had no visual input whatsoever concerning his more powerful days. And I can even see him still, now excarnated.

I don’t look in my mirrors. I have long not needed them. I can easily brush teeth and perform other functions without looking at myself. Externally. But I look at myself within pretty regularly these years. When there is something disappointing noted, I’ve learned to treat it with a quiet dispassionate resolve. “This soul quality shall gradually be improved… I vow it so!” And when I see something good, I try my best to eradicate too much excess pride surrounding it. Often I just smile or laugh about it, and its catalog of related memories. And in an exceptionally awake mood, I feel tiny surges of thanks to this or that interaction I’ve had with another person which somehow helped, even in a small way, to instantiate this quality inside me. I know what I’m like, and what I could be. I have an intimate perspective. I even can grab a quick glimpse of myself engaging in some self-deception every now and then, and file the matter for later disposal. But no external mirror informs this viewing, in any way. If another human smiles at me, or flashes appreciation due to something I said or did — that’s good enough self-imaging for me.

I have to wonder about how the seeming proliferation of mirrors in our culture is misdirecting our attention down irrelevant alley ways. Maybe on my final excarnation day, if the opportunity presents, I will glance into an external mirror. And smile at the miraculous disparity.

_______RS

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