On Reflection

Here’s a question for you. When you reflect, where do you put the mirror?

This seems a silly question, and that’s because it is. But there’s also something here too, because having thought about reflection recently it occurred to me that reflecting on reflection itself isn’t without its value. And luckily, unlike when we put mirrors against mirrors in real life, creating a headache-inducing cascade of images (which I recently experienced at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Tate Modern), we can stop our reflecting on reflection after only one reflective layer. But still, with its own repetitions, this paragraph shows how dangerous and disorientating such mirroring can be if we are not careful about it.

So. When we see our reflections in real life, we stand in front of a mirror. Alternatively, we turn on the camera on our phones, but I am too old for that already. Facing the mirror, our goal is to examine our physical appearance. Up close, in the mirror of a washroom or via our phone’s selfie camera, we get to investigate the blemishes, the little blotches and patches of colour, the wrinkles and the hairs. From further away, we check out our figure, or how the clothes sit on us. We might be taking advantage of a mirror on the inside of a cupboard to help us select an outfit.

In both cases, from close up or far away, we are seeing ourselves as an object in others’ eyes. We want to look good because when we look good we feel confident and happier. Even if we turn our backs on beauty products and fancy clothes, we certainly don’t want to look bad. This isn’t complicated. We use mirrors and physical reflection – the fake image of ourselves – to improve the real image of ourselves. Mirrors make the world more beautiful, if a little more narcissistic too.

This isn’t too interesting. What is, is when we reflect in a different way. Now, when you try and answer the ridiculous question I set at the beginning of the post, what did you come up with? I’ll tell you what I got. You place the mirrors right in front of your eyes. You look immediately back into yourself, without worrying about such silliness as what you are wearing. Here you are trying to descry the state of your soul.

Reflection in this sense is a matter of personal diagnostics. We are trying to work out our own selves. It’s connected to things like mindfulness. When we reflect, we try to understand our feelings and why we feel that way. We are trying to follow the wires and circuitry of our inner being, such that we might, with any luck, prevent ourselves from falling into bad moral and spiritual habits.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” Father Zosima, in the Brothers Karamazov.

Reflection is designed to stop just this. By understanding ourselves, we can uproot the lies that have gained purchase within us and prevent hypocrisy, that most fatal and inevitable of human weaknesses. The more we understand ourselves, the less likely it is that we will be able to deceive ourselves. If we spend enough time immersed in our hearts, we deprive the devils that live the chance of twisting them in unhealthy directions.

Yet is that all actually right? The first thing that you will have noticed when I suggested putting the mirrors right in front of one’s eyes is that this position completely obscures the light. Now, the soul is a murky place, but even so, doesn’t it need some light for us to actually see? What a hindrance the darkness is. Though we might be attempting to remove the rot from the floorboards, it is precisely the dark and the wet that the dark contains, which makes the rot exist, to begin with. We go into ourselves, find nothing, come out again and pat ourselves on the back, missing the obvious.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending deals with reflection as one of its central concerns. First, the narrator takes us on an introspective tour of his life, reaching one conclusion. Then, new information comes to light, and he does the same tour all over again, reaching a completely different conclusion. The process of reflection is the same both times. But what we see is that reflection of a certain sort can be an act of self-deceit. To continue the silly metaphor, how are things supposed to enter us if we have mirrors covering our eyes? Don’t we all cry out with despair every time Stevens fails to notice his life and his opportunities are slipping away in The Remains of the Day?

Introspection is a fairly useless thing when you put the mirrors in front of your eyes. Useless at its best, but often downright hostile. Turning our gaze inwards prevents us from noticing others or the world outside. These modern novels that are so deep within someone else’s head always bother me because they portray quite an unhealthy way of going through life. I confess I am probably more self-centred than most, but even I am more aware of the world and its inhabitants than the likes of Else in Schindler’s Fraulein Else. Of course, Else is not what we would call mentally O.K. But even the narrator in The Sense of an Ending is pretty bad at this. The deeper we go into ourselves, the less we seem to get out, and the less we act as members of the external community as well.

Who has not, on this score, found how utterly useless reflection is when dealing with depression? Thinking, reflecting, and ruminating, rather than actually using those CBT techniques to dismember one’s bad feelings, that is. When we reflect while depressed then it really is like we are in a hall of mirrors, because we only get dizzier and dizzier, and further and further away from what is real and meaningful.

One solution to ruminating depression that often works wonders is talking to others. Unburdening one’s soul is removing the feelings from the damp cellar I described earlier and shoving them into the light, where they are often quickly disinfected. Is there not a way of placing the mirrors that also does this?

Indeed, readers, I have determined that there is.

The optimal location for the mirrors when we are reflecting is right in front of us, just like when we are getting changed, but the mirrors in this case are also rather wide, so that we can see the world behind us instead of just ourselves and what we are wearing. When we reflect, we need to be able to place ourselves as a unit within a community. Reflecting when we only get deeper and deeper into ourselves fails to let us see how we fit into the narratives of others’ lives. Rather than binding us to others, reflecting in that sense divides us. Not so here, where we are obliged to see the connections between us all because we have to see others wandering about in the background, even as we focus on ourselves.

Does this mirror placement prevent hypocrisy or lies? Certainly not, but it also lets us see our actions as they are played out in the world, rather than only in our distorted memories. It becomes harder to hide from ourselves. Coupled with seeing ourselves as part of a network of human beings this mirror placement might make us a more responsible being too.

I was reflecting on reflection because I have been thinking about some of Adorno’s comments on fascism, namely how among those who fall victim to it their common characteristic is their inability to reflect. Reflection is obviously hugely important, but so is reflecting the right way, not just going into yourself and expecting that in itself to be enough to sort things out. Adorno, of course, understood that fact when he noted that working through the past is a process we must do every day, rather than simply do in one go and then move on. Here, however, I just wanted to have some fun thinking about what reflection might look like, and how we might want to visualise it.

We might go further and think about a form of reflection in which we ourselves are invisible (the mirror is placed alongside our eyes and takes in images from without). This we could equate to certain Buddhist teachings or else Schopenhauer’s own renunciation-orientated ideals of life. And there are things like music and literature and great art in general, all of which can also lead us to reflect in a way that removes our own egos from the equation.

But those are topics for another day.

Shadows, Objects, and Life Arguments – Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows

In many ways, the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows can be read as a companion to Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea, which I read this summer. Where Okakura’s book is ostensibly about tea, Tanizaki’s essay is ostensibly about aesthetics – but actually, both are really about the differences between certain ideas of Western and Japanese culture, and more broadly about separate ways of life. In Praise of Shadows is a flowing work, one as hard to pin down as the shadows themselves. It ranges in subject from traditional Japanese theatre to Japanese architecture, from food to lacquerware. Yet certain repeated ideas make for an argument, at least for an implicit one, on a few key topics – the passage of time, the development of Japanese culture, and finally about objects themselves.

Time, Pessimism, Development

In Praise of Shadows is steeped in pessimism – Tanizaki is writing as a culture he loves is ebbing away – but he is not writing as a force of reaction. One tension of the essay lies between his desire to preserve the past and his unwillingness to completely disregard the present. Early on he describes the building of a house and the ingenuity one might employ to maintain the traditional shapes and forms of old Japanese homes while incorporating wires and electric lights, only to remark that an ideal of simplicity now can be a lightbulb hanging alone and unadorned – what previously might seem sacrilegious to a world used to candles.

Tanizaki is no fan of much that the West had brought Japan, however. He directs particular ire towards the electric fan. But still he notes that our opposition must be limited by each specific context. We can leave such things out of our own homes, but if we have a business operating in the summer heat we must also defer to the customer. This idea that we have to adapt and make compromises to the reality we face is a key idea within the text. He does not dismiss Western medicine or science or inventions out of hand, but rather notes that they bear with themselves an adaption to Western modes, and not his own in Japan. Hospitals, for example, need not be built according to Western models, but instead could use more bamboo and wood. The problem with all of this is that perhaps things would have been better if Japan had been left to itself. “We would have gone only in a direction that suited us.” Like Herder in the German lands, Tanizaki views each nation or grouping as having their own distinguishing characteristics which better internally developed than copied from others.

Western things bring western thinking. The fountain pen brings with it a different way of writing, and an implicit exhortation to copy Western literary modes. At times Tanizaki seems to go too far in these arguments, such as when he finds even paper bearing distinctive signs of whether it was produced in the West or Japan. Now, fountain pen users will know that Japan’s paper is extraordinary, such as that produced by Tomoe River. Indeed, Japan’s fountain pens and inks are also rather amazing – those of Sailor and Pilot are particularly lovely, and some of their pens have the most brilliant lacquer work designs. This is adaption in practice, taking a thing of the West and transforming it using Japan’s particular characteristics and modes. I imagine Tanizaki might have approved.

Still, In Praise of Shadows is a work where we are witnesses to something slipping away. Ways of eating, theatre shows, even the role of women, are being changed in ways that leave tradition in the dust. The essay ends with a hope that “perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them”. The mansion he refers to us that of artistic and literary culture, the area where he hopes resistance to Western influences may be most effectively pursued. It now makes sense to turn to that sphere and see what the fuss with shadows is all about.

Shadows, Objects and Life Arguments

Tanizaki defines Japanese culture as being one of shadows; the West as one of light. This seems slightly ridiculous at first glance, but worth taking seriously as out of this dichotomy Tanizaki draws all of his arguments about ways of living in the world. And is he not right, anyway? Our rooms are very bright – we certainly do not like the dark. We prefer spotless, shining cleanliness to the dirt that accumulates with age and contains within itself something akin to a history. (Think only about the hordes of servants who once went around polishing the silverware.) We are served food on white bowls, white plates; our bathrooms are tiled. We purchase great cleanliness with a great emptiness of character in many of our surroundings.

For light is a thing that reveals, whereas dark and shadows do more than that – they contain the space where the imagination plays. Puppets, Tanizaki notes, seem more real in the dark. They movements gain a certain magic. And puppets are not alone. Food can be supremely enhanced by the atmosphere of its serving. A dark lacquer bowl works better than a plain white bowl because in that darkness a soup’s contents are not on display as at market. Instead, there is an air of mystery – a taste of mystery, in fact:

“Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, or overtones but partly suggested.”

This imagination from darkness is connected very much to the arguments about simplicity that Okakura makes in The Book of Tea. There, one of the most memorable chapters concerned the decoration of tea rooms. To us Westerners, a room with only a single painting would strike us as sparsely adorned. But for Okakura, a single object focuses our attention on a single thing. It creates a much purer and more effective atmosphere – and thus a more pleasant tea-drinking experience. If adorning a room sparsely creates a stronger effect then why would we do anything otherwise? (The argument does not suggest that lush decoration is wrong, but rather than clutter is wrong – harmony is the lesson to be learned from this, and harmony is easier to achieve using simplicity).

But there is something else at play here, lying behind this argument about simplicity, something connected to Tanizaki’s pessimism earlier. What makes us value light, and the Japanese dark? In Tanizaki’s view, it’s a kind of stoicism:

“We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light – his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”

We may disagree with this characterisation of the West – and people familiar with Japan may well disagree with Tanizaki’s view of his own culture. But once again we encounter an argument for making the most not just of fewer things, but also of present things instead of what we lack. Just as he regrets that Japan’s development has been so influenced by the West instead of Japan developing independently, we can see a corresponding idea in why we might choose to value shadows:

“The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.”

If we find beauty and value in what we have, we will have no need of anything more.

Conclusion

Tanizaki’s characterisation of the West as a collective block is at times tedious, but unlike Okakura he was writing for a domestic audience in his own language and we must forgive him that. What he says is interesting and worth reading because although we may have heard the ideas before – simplicity good, unthinking acceptance of foreign technology and influence is not always a great plan – by focusing on shadows he adds further depth to these arguments and makes them still more attractive to us. We may already know that objects can be better appreciated in isolation, but in In Praise of Shadows we learn about how shadows work to help objects make that better impression. In our quest to make a beautiful world, after reading this short essay we have another tool in our toolbox for making that happen.

The Salon

I have always been jealous of the poets and writers of yore. The name on a book tends to be singular, but the reality was that almost every great name lived at one time or other as part of a circle, whose every member buoyed each other up, so that the work that came out the other end always bore the marks of collaboration. I think of Goethe’s friends at Jena and Weimar in particular, or the various literary-revolutionary circles in Russia. The best things anyone has ever achieved have always been the work of groups, and literature is no exception. The salons, the visiting evenings of the nineteenth century’s aristocracy always left me feeling more than a little jealous, for our world has changed, and such things are little possible today. But not, it must be said, impossible altogether.

In my case, I was inspired by a friend of mine. One year, he invited me and several other friends round to his house in Jurmala, on the Baltic coast, to meet his girlfriend. I had met her before, but not his friends. One was a refugee from Russia, a revolutionary featured in the papers who was now living in the US, another was a Czech interested in China and AI while still able to speak Latin, and the third was a genius in the truest and most chaotic sense of the word. Every day it was politics, history, art, and conversation heaped upon conversation. Good food, walks around Riga and along the Baltic coast – nothing could top the impression it left upon me. The girl herself spent the time hiding upstairs. In all honesty, I cannot blame her. I remember walking out of my room one midmorning to hear some of the guys downstairs talking about British fascism in a way that wasn’t quite condemnatory enough for my tastes, then wheeling around and going back to bed.

But the time I had there left a strong impression on me, and eventually, I decided to organise something similar with my own friends. We are extremely lucky to have a Swiss chalet in our family’s possession, and I took the approach that not sharing it with others would be a terrible waste. Switzerland, that legendary neutral country, is also at the centre of Europe and easily accessible from any of its corners – or indeed, from further afield. It was a logical choice for a friend group that has since university been scattered like marbles from an upturned bag.

As I get older, I have come to certain realisations that may seem quite ridiculous to those who have already reached them, but which would seem equally ridiculous to those who have yet to have made them their own. The good life, at least the kind of good life that I am after, is so simple that I sometimes feel I must have missed something. Good food, fresh air and nature, meaningful and impactful work, the company of people I love, the self-realisation that comes through creative endeavour, the expansion of the soul that comes through learning and sharing one’s thoughts with others – these are simple things. Yet to notice them and then to live according to them, to make them real and present – that’s the task of our entire lives.

The inaugural salon had as its goal the bringing together of a number of my friends in an environment that would allow people to rest, to think and to walk, with as little stress and as much freedom as possible. I imagined everyone lounging on sofas discussing Kant or some other interesting topic, perhaps with a glass of wine dangling precipitously over the carpet, exhausted physically after a day spent hiking in the mountains.

I miscalculated. I miscalculated both in ways that were positive and in ways that were negative. My first mistake was a certain overconfidence. You would have thought that an invitation to spend up to a week staying in a Swiss chalet for free with no obligations other than occasionally croaking something interesting for the host’s entertainment would be extremely popular. It was not so. There were many mumbled apologies and sorry-I’m-busys, which in the latter case at least was almost certainly partly my fault for being a little disorganised about sending invites. In the end, instead of two weeks and eight to twelve guests, the salon was only one week and only four guests, plus myself and my girlfriend. For a trial run, which this was, I think it was for the best.

First, those positives. I found myself enjoying things that I wouldn’t have expected. Being a host was actually a lot of fun – setting the table, cooking meals, doing the washing up, and maintaining a certain amount of order and cleanliness. It wasn’t just my desire to control things that made me have fun; it was also a certain amount of pride in offering a service to others and trying to make it the best I could. Whether it was getting up early to make the house nice or standing by the sink half-hearing conversations after dinner, there was real romance in what I was doing that I had hardly expected.

I also discovered that my ideal of people just lounging about philosophising isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I ended up with four people in all – and to simplify in a way that is a little uncharitable to the people themselves who are far more complicated than this makes it sound, there were two people who were quiet and philosophical, and two who were much louder and “normal”. I discovered that the person with whom I probably had the best chats, the one most obviously deep down a certain spectrum I myself belong on, was also the one who was outright unable to help with the cooking or cleaning, and whose behaviour was generally fairly odd. (There is a restaurant I will be embarrassed to return to on his account). But on the bright side, one evening while the others danced drunkenly inside, I stood with him on the balcony discussing Aquinas and the challenges of interpreting early Biblical texts that remain even when one knows the original languages, for he is studying Ancient Hebrew in Israel.

Those loud people, who did not necessarily always want to discuss the loftiest topics – though, of course, we managed that perfectly well as well – turned out to provide things I hadn’t counted on needing when I started planning. They were great around the house, cooking, cleaning, and making such a hubbub that everything was bathed in a warm orange glow. What I had forgotten was that intellectual conversations without much life surrounding them, no matter the passion behind them, feel somewhat sad and empty after a while. In short, I realised that I should put far more weight behind factors that I had not previously considered important.

Things I had not counted on were mostly related to the actual running of things. There was a certain amount of stress concerning money and making sure nobody spilled anything on the carpet. More difficult, however, was the tiredness that sunk its teeth ever deeper into me as the week-or-so went on. Now, true to the salon’s aims, I could just disappear upstairs for a nap – the guests, left to themselves, were happy to go for walks or read Jane Austen or do whatever work they had – but even so, I found myself getting grumpier and ever more tired as the time went on, which obviously turned me from that prim and proper host I had been at the beginning into a terrible creature much befitting the mountains around us and their mood of Romantic desolation. I am extremely grateful to my girlfriend for not only taking on the lion’s share of the housekeeping, but also doing it fantastically. Without her I think we might have starved conversationally and definitely would have starved culinarily. 

Now that everyone has gone, I am able to reflect. Already the tiredness is dripping away, and what remains are the good things – the photos, the memories, the numbness in my legs from all those walks, and last but not least my newly-acquired knowledge of the early Church Fathers. The fundamental idea behind the salon, of bringing my friends together, worked like a charm. There were good conversations, both with and without me. People who knew each other, got to know each other better, and those who did not know each other, managed to make at least a new acquaintance, and possibly in a case or two, a new friend.

What we are doing in this life, I still don’t know. We make decisions whose consequences we cannot apprehend, and even those decisions are made with the desperation of someone being carried down a hurtling river, reaching for something to hold on to. But I can say that, except for my wallet, which is not that important anyway, the salon achieved what I wanted it to do. It made a break in the torrent, a space for rest and for caring about people rather than one’s goals and ambitions, and for that I am grateful. I hope that next year we may manage two weeks instead of just the one and get new people to experience the wonder of the Swiss Alps and the peace of the mountain peaks.