February 21, 2025

We cannot see ourselves. Unaided, we do not know what we look like, cannot see ourselves as others see us. That is why the human race has always been fascinated with mirrors. This line of thought has been provoked by a very, well, provoking book called, believe it or not, Bubbles, a 663-page Mad Tea Party of a book by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, which is volume 1 of a trilogy called Spheres. You will be hearing more about Bubbles later, when I manage to finish it, but what caught me was a single statement. Sloterdijk says that “until recently, the quasi-totality of the human race consisted of individuals who never, or only in highly exceptional situations, saw their own faces” (192, 197). His reason? “Glass mirrors of the type common today have only existed since c.1500—and initially only in Venice. Supplying large parts of populations with mirrors only really began in the nineteenth century, and the process would not have been complete in the First World until the middle of the twentieth” (197).

This is an example of Sloterdijk’s slapdash brilliance. His intuitive capacity to see associational patterns of imagery is so powerful that it outruns his ability to construct those patterns into a coherent argument, sometimes even into coherent sentences, and sometimes his hobbyhorses gallop away with him, as here, where he is intent on attacking Freud’s “pseudo-proofs for so-called Narcissism” and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s “tragically presumptuous theorem” about the “mirror stage” in child development. How can narcissism be a universal phenomenon when there were no mirrors? Well, in the first place, Narcissus did not fall in love with his image in a mirror—he saw his reflection in water. In the second place, there were mirrors before glass mirrors. They were usually made of obsidian or polished metal, and the image in them was dim and imperfect compared with modern mirrors. That is why Paul says that in this life we see as in a mirror, darkly (I Corinthians 13:12). The King James translation confuses the issue by saying “glass,” a modernization. Paul meant a polished metal mirror in which the image was indeed dark. But there were mirrors, and people saw themselves: the Wikipedia article on mirrors is full of pictures of women as far back as ancient Egypt looking at themselves with hand mirrors. I don’t want to play the petty scholarly game of scoring points, and there is plenty in Bubbles that is brilliant and thought-provoking. But in this case Sloterdijk walks right past a major question. It is very much worth asking why people have been fascinated by mirrors despite the low quality of available mirrors until modern times.

People can derive a sense of self without seeing their image in a mirror—blind people do so perfectly well. Jacques Lacan’s idea of the “mirror stage” to explain the formation of a child’s “ego” or “I” can’t be taken deterministically as a stage all children necessarily go through. Lacan himself backed away from that initial interpretation in the course of his career. But it is true that human babies are among the few animals who recognize their own image in a mirror. Most of the others are higher primates, although, interestingly, as lovers of Babar will not be surprised to hear, elephants can do it. Other animals notice their image—I have seen dogs and cats do so—but they apparently do not recognize the images as themselves. A couple of summers ago, an obsessive cardinal spent the whole season attacking its own image, over and over, in my front wall entirely of windows, clearly taking it for some obnoxious intruder. But for at least some human children, seeing themselves in a mirror is an epiphany: “That’s me.” This is a complex moment, because at that moment the child has split into two selves. The child has become an other to itself; it is both subject observing and object being observed. Lacan referred to these as the Moi and the Je, the me and the I. We know ourselves by objectifying ourselves, if not through a mirror image then by some other means.

What is the child’s response to its self-recognition? Lacan claims it is jubilance: the child sees an image of wholeness, an “ideal ego,” whereas its internal sense of itself is disjointed and chaotic. This is a moment of narcissism: “Oh, how beautiful am I.” Narcissism implies insecurity. Narcissistic people ask, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” because they need to be reassured. Portraits of monarchs and members of the aristocracy are carefully idealized. Women have always been stereotyped as narcissistic, whereas of course the truth is that they are forced to be conscious of their looks by a society that demands feminine beauty. But perhaps it is signficant that Ovid in the Metamorphoses chose to make the original Narcissus a male, and male narcissism is a good deal more toxic than women’s vanity. Right now, it is male narcissists who are destroying the world, insecure, childish men who have to prove they are powerful in the only way they know how, by breaking the other children’s toys and watching them cry. There are not three more insecure men in the world than Trump, Musk, and Kennedy, Jr. To what degree, however, are they products of their society? Long before the Internet, before doctored Facebook profiles and the compulsion to take constant selfies, the historian Christopher Lasch wrote a book called The Culture of Narcissism (1978), arguing that we have become a society that cares for image over actual accomplishment. Such a society is easily duped by con artists, those who know how to manipulate image, and it is con artists who have convinced the low-information voters to give them power.

However, not everyone enjoys looking at their image in a mirror or a photograph. Shakespeare’s Henry V describes himself as someone “who never looks in his mirror because he loves what he sees there.” I hate looking at myself in a mirror or at photos of myself—I am the least photogenic person who ever lived. I need a mirror for shaving, and that’s it. About the only thing I don’t like about my new apartment is its bathroom mirrors. The so-called master bathroom has two sinks, behind which the entire wall is one huge mirror. Do I want to come out of the shower and look at myself every day in all that glass? It’s like a sex parlor—and who is it, by the way, who wants to watch themselves in a mirror having sex? I will be using the other, much smaller bathroom, and may cover some of the larger bathroom’s mirror with pictures. I have never taken a selfie in my life. The less I see of myself the better. At my age, it’s a matter of Dorian Gray syndrome, but I’ve always been that way. It’s like hearing your own voice on a recording—if you teach and have a podcast, you have to get used to it, but hearing yourself is always a little bit alienating. That can’t be me.

This is not a pretense of modesty, but rather an attempt to explore the complexity of the moment in which we see ourselves reflected and objectified. Surely Freud is right that a certain amount of narcissism is necessary for all of us. Our self-image is to a significant degree a reflection from other people. We learn who we are and how to value ourselves from seeing how we are mirrored in others’ perception of us. Part of the task of teaching is to serve as a mirror to show students who they are. They doubt their own perception of themselves, and reflecting back to them their virtues, both academic and personal, can do a great deal of good. People who are relatively independent of other people’s view of them are using a different mirror: an inward mirror rather than an outward one. That mirror is a kind of conscience, such as the Freudian superego, and reflects how the ego measures up to an internal model. But for those who lack self-reflection, an external standard may be necessary. When Hamlet, assuming that his mother was a knowing accessory to the murder of his father by his own brother, confronts Gertrude in her room, he says, “You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you.” The mirror may flatter, but it may also turn into an accuser. It is an insult to tell someone that you don’t know how they can stand to look at themselves in a mirror. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror” is a dramatic monologue spoken by a mirror whose owner does not love it because, it says,

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful…

The mirror’s owner cannot bear such truth:

A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

What she most of all cannot bear is the mirror’s evidence that she is aging:

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

The tragic heroine of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1832, 1842) depicts another possible relationship of women to mirrors. The Lady is shut up in a tower, forced to weave images of the outer world without ever having contact with it. Instead, she has a magic mirror that shows her the world from a distance. The magic mirror that shows elsewhere and elsewhen is a folktale motif, a literary example being the mirror of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. The Lady is shut away from the world as women were shut away in the Victorian era, trapped in a sequestered unreality. Tennyson’s imagination was captured by such imprisoned women. In his poem “Mariana,” the title character is taken from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, where she is said to be shut up in a “moated grange,” so that she is weary of life and wishes she were dead. The Lady of Shalott too cannot bear her isolation: “I am half-sick of shadows, / Says the Lady of Shalott.” After seeing Sir Lancelot in the mirror, she leaves her tower and goes floating down the river to arrive dead in his presence. Here, the Lady possesses a mirror in which her own image does not appear, which means she has no self to be reflected. Yet she does not have the world either, only “shadows” that the mirror shows her—only a virtual world, as we would say now. She is thus willing to die in order to achieve both a self and contact with reality.

The mirrors with which other people reflect us are their eyes: the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 speaks of being “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” A mirror passively reflects what is in front of it, but other people may present us with an image of ourselves that is not only negative but intended as a weapon or instrument of control. This led to the concept of the Gaze in 20^th century philosophy and psychoanalysis, explored by thinkers such as Sartre, Lacan, Michel Foucault, and by some feminist scholars and film critics. Nothing is more uncomfortable than being stared at. It is why some people cannot stand up and speak in front of a group. When you teach, you have to get used to having an entire room of eyes fixed upon you. The Gaze is the experience of feeling that you have become an object stared at by others. You have become objectified, and that is an anxious and alienating experience.

Of course, modern thinkers were not the first to become aware of this universal psychodynamic. In Milton’s Samson Agonistes, the blinded Samson says that his worst torment, far worse than grinding at the mill enslaved, is being stared at by others and not able to stare back. Psychoanalytically, fear of being blinded is a castration anxiety, which certainly fits Samson, who has been undone and unmanned by a tempting woman. Samson accedes to the humiliating demand that he perform feats of strength in front of his enemies the Philistines, being stared at as a public spectacle, but only in order to bring their temple down on top of them, sacrificing himself in the act. Surveillance is part of the punishment of prisons. In the late 18^th century, the social philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed the idea of a “panopticon,” a prison designed so that all prisoners can be observed by a single officer without knowing whether or not they are being observed. Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975) noted the totalitarian tendencies of such an idea of universal surveillance, recent forms of which are electronic rather than architectural, such as the telescreens in Orwell’s 1984, not to mention, of course, the Internet. Feminist critics have shown that the Gaze is a way of making women passive objects designed to be looked at rather than active subjects. Insecure men react with anger when women refuse to be objectified and therefore compliant objects of their pleasure. When they reject the male Gaze, women become threatening to such men. The role of women, they feel, is not only to be trophy wives and girlfriends, good to look at, but to be narcissistic mirrors reflecting back to the men that they are the manliest of them all. When a woman dares to gaze back, she becomes deadly, a Medusa whose gaze will turn a man to stone. Significantly, the hero Perseus was able to slay Medusa by using his shield as a mirror, to avoid looking at her directly.

Modern rebels may wear shades to hide their eyes, thus becoming impersonal: the cyberpunks of the 80’s wore mirrorshades, which reflected the Gaze of others back upon themselves. If the sense of alienation becomes intense enough, the Gaze of the Other may personify into an actual double or doppelganger, a mirror image but reversed, as images in mirrors are reversed. In Darren Aranofsky’s psychological horror film Black Swan (2010), Natalie Portman plays a ballerina required to play the double roles of White Swan and Black Swan in the ballet Swan Lake. But she cracks under severe psychological pressure, an event signified by the breaking of a mirror. Her schizophrenia involves her conflict with doubles, including a rival dancer to whom she is attracted and her mother, who pushes her to become the successful dancer that she failed to become. In the end, she successfully dances both her light and dark sides, but realizes she has committed suicide without even knowing it, having stabbed herself with a shard of the broken mirror.

Sloterdijk is certainly right that the advent of modern glass mirrors changed the act of self-reflection. It made possible, for example, the new genre of the artist’s self-portrait, a momentous change from the Middle Ages, when artists were anonymous craftsmen. Albrecht Dürer’s famous self-portrait, and the multiple self-portraits of Rembrandt, who produced something like 100 images of himself over 40 years, signify a new kind of self-consciousness. The creation of a self-portrait is a meditation on the artist as a self-creator. However, along with this new kind of self-consciousness comes an awareness of the limitations of art to reflect reality accurately. Perhaps this accounts for the occasional use of a convex mirror, as in Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror of 1524, which inspired a poem by John Ashbery with the same title. There is no doubt the motive of demonstrating the artist’s virtuosity in being able to reproduce the convex mirror’s distorted image, but it may also be a way of implying that all artistic self-representations involve a necessary distortion.

The same new self-consciousness began to influence portraits of other people. Two of the most famous paintings in art history are portraits that are at the same time a meditation on the mutually-reflecting relationship among the subjects being painted, the artist, and the viewer. One is the Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 by Jan van Eyck. Behind the couple in the painting’s foreground is a convex mirror, and in that mirror are reflected two figures, the figure in red assumed by art historians to be the artist himself, standing in front of the couple but also in the place of the viewer of the painting. The other is Las Meninas by Velasquez (1656), which is even more complex. In the foreground are the 5-year-old Infanta of Spain and her entourage, but with Velasquez himself to the viewer’s left, with a large easel. He cannot be painting the Infanta, then, but must be painting the couple seen in the mirror on the back wall, the King and Queen. Yet that mirror is not, as we might expect, at the painting’s vanishing point, which is occupied by a figure on a set of stairs, the Queen’s chamberlain. Then of course there is the viewer, who is in the space occupied by the King and Queen. All these complex relationships imply that reality is a matter of perspective, and therefore relative to one’s point of view. There is not one reality: a kind of theory of painterly relativity tells us that reality shifts according to one’s particular standpoint. Thus, reality is metamorphic, so that it is no accident that the paintings on the walls depict scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The ultimate implied question is whether a mimetic art is able to capture reality at all. During the same century, Hamlet tells the Players that art should “hold the mirror up to nature,” but in fact Hamlet turns out to be a kind of hall of mirrors in which the lesson is that which Yeats draws from a Greek sculpture: “That knowledge increases unreality, that / Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.”

The first thinker to discuss mimesis, art’s attempt to capture reality by a mirrorlike representation, was Plato, and he denied that it was possible. At the other end of the Western tradition, the postmodern mood has returned to Platonic skepticism. The theme of philosopher Richard Rorty’s influential book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) is that what he calls “truth of correspondence,” in which a representation corresponds to or mirrors reality, is impossible, a failed project of many centuries. What now? Well, realism depicts the surfaces of things: a painter like Jan van Eyck captures of details and texture of every object in what we would now call photographic realism. Yet, if the surface is just an illusion, there is another possibility. If we look into a mirror, we see our own image, but also a whole world behind that image that seems to open into depths behind the mirror. It is the reflection of our world, and yet it seems strangely other—for one thing, it is reversed. If surface realism does not serve us, what if we enter the mirror? In other words, the mirror may become what in the vocabulary of the criticism of fantasy is called a “portal,” the famous example being of course Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll’s second Alice book. In portal fantasies, characters journey to an Otherworld that is the other side of this world, a world that is different from ours, often reversed. The motif of doubling appears throughout Through the Looking-Glass, which is modeled on a game of chess, a game whose two sets of pieces mirror each other. Alice meets twins, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who tell her that we are all dreams of the Red King.

The Otherworld in fantasy is in some way a dream world—it is, then, a representation of the unconscious. At the center of modern mythology is the myth of the descent quest into a lower world that is symbolic of a descent into the unconscious. If our world is life, the Otherworld is, among other things, the world of death. In Jean Cocteau’s renowned film Orpheus (1950), a modernized retelling of the Orpheus myth, Death is a woman dressed in black who comes out of a mirror and takes away Orpheus’s love Eurydice. Orpheus must go through the mirror to get her back. He does so, but with the provision that he must never look at her again. Of course this is impossible, and she vanishes after Orpheus accidentally glimpses her in a mirror—the car’s rear-view mirror. But Cocteau is revisionist: Orpheus dies, returns to the underworld, and Death decides to die herself, upon which Orpheus and Eurydice return with no memory of what has happened.

Mirrors reverse reality, and the goal of the descent into the mirror world is reversal. So far we have spoken of mirrors as ironic images of objectification, splitting, doubling, and the multiplication of illusions. The reversal of such a negative vision would start with the idea that mirrors capture and hold light, though they may also pass the light onward by reflection. In the Christian tradition, that light is spirit, and its source is God, who is light, according to the opening of the Gospel of John. God is in heaven, but God is everywhere. As the tremendous opening of Dante’s Paradiso says, the light that is God penetrates the entire universe, shining in one part more and another part less. Everything in the cosmos mirrors God, cradles some part of his light, the light of the spirit, as much as it is capable of.

This is by no means imagery particular to Dante. There was a whole genre called “speculum literature” of works that attempted to be encyclopedic compilations of all knowledge, the name coming from the idea that the image of God is mirrored in all aspects of natural and human life. The Speculum Maius (or Majus) or Great Mirror of Vincent of Beauvais in the 13^th century consisted of three parts, the Mirror of Nature, the Mirror of History, and the Mirror of Doctrine. We note that our words “speculation” and “reflection” derive from this idea of mirroring. The Divine Comedy could be described as the attempt at an imaginative rather than a scholarly speculum, and the Paradiso especially is full of imagery not only of light and reflection but of mirroring. In its 2^nd canto, Beatrice gives a long and very complex lecture explaining how the spiritual light, which is generated in the highest heaven, the Empyrean, is passed downward through the cosmos by reflection. Dante is drawing here upon the main source of Christian angelology, the work of Pseudo-Dionysus, who said that there is a hierarchy of 9 orders of angels, and that each rank reflects the light downward to the rank below it. To prove her point, Beatrice even suggests an experiment involving 3 mirrors. If you put the mirrors at varying distances from a source of light, the reflected light will actually have the same brightness, she says, although the light from the more distant mirror will be smaller. Two mirrors would have been enough to make her point, but of course in the Comedy everything has to come in 3’s. This may sound rather abstract, but the idea is of a cosmos that holds the image of God as a still lake holds the image of the mountain above it. I would risk comparing it to the Eastern image of Indra’s net, which is made of jewels, with each jewel reflecting every other jewel, illustrating the concept of “interpenetration” which profoundly influenced Northrop Frye. Such is the mirror of nature, the subject of the first part of Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Maius.

What of the idea of a mirror of history? In English, a once-influential work was the Mirror for Magistrates, a collection of verse tales by various authors whose first edition was published in 1555. “Magistrate” here means ruler, and the work consists of tales of rulers who fell from power, with the idea that the work may be a mirror into which later rulers may look and learn by seeing themselves reflected in the careers of other men of power. It is a huge, dull, and rambling work, but Shakespeare’s history plays are a mirror of history on a much higher artistic level.

However, the idea of a mirror of history ultimately goes beyond the didactic and exemplary. Northrop Frye in his first book about the Bible, The Great Code, speaks of the organization of the Christian Bible, with its Old and New Testaments, as a “double mirror.” The Old and New Testaments reflect each other, and neither points to some historical, factual truth outside itself. The Bible thus makes no attempt at Rorty’s “truth of correspondence.” The truth of the Bible is non-literal and symbolic. That does not mean it is mere fiction. As Frye puts it, the Bible is not unhistorical but counter-historical. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake, and the Bible’s mythical and metaphorical language attempts to awaken us from the nightmare of history.

A double mirror structure is a kind of closed circuit, hermetically sealed and self-sufficient. Strange to say, that kind of structure appears on a very human level. Chapter 2 of Sloterdijk’s Bubbles is titled “Between Faces: On the Appearance of the Interfacial Intimate Sphere.” In it, he traces through medieval art the image of two faces locked in a loving gaze, the most recurrent being those of Madonna and Christ child. This is a positive version of the alienating Gaze, and it is one of Sloterdijk’s “spheres,” as the mutual gaze of mother and child form an intimate circle, “dyadic” and yet one. Sloterdijk does not seem to be much interested in literature, but the image of two lovers’ mutual gaze forming a world unto itself occurs repeatedly in the love poetry of John Donne, as in “The Good Morrow”:

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?

In “The Canonization,” the world prays to the two lovers,

Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)

The lovers, as they lie abed with their mutually-mirroring gaze, create a world unto themselves. In yet another poem, “The Sun Rising,” the speaker says, “She’s all states, and all princes, I, / Nothing else is.” Their love forms a double mirror that forms a reality unto itself. The “real world” outside is an illusion.

When Dante meets Beatrice in the Garden of Eden at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, she is veiled, and all he can see of her is her green eyes. When, a short while later, he is unable to look directly at the sun in order to rise up towards the source of that light, he looks at it reflected, as in a mirror, in Beatrice’s eyes. This signifies Beatrice’s function as an intermediary. Donne, although a later poet, remains within the conventions of the Courtly Love tradition, in which the love of a man and a woman, expressed through their mutual gaze, creates a world more real than that of the external world. But Dante transvalues Courtly Love by making it a step along the journey to a higher Christian love. Reunion with Beatrice is not the end of Dante’s journey. Rather, she draws him upward towards the source of the light by reflecting it from her eyes into his—upward, into the world of light that is the Paradiso. There are 9 spheres in Dante’s version of heaven. Dante, guided by Beatrice, traverses them as he has traversed 9 levels in his journeys through hell and purgatory. But when he reaches the 9^th sphere, that of the Primum Mobile or Prime Mover, he encounters a “model” of the universe—and he is puzzled, because the model reverses the ordinary perspective of his experience thus far, the time-space perspective of the “natural man.”

Although the word “mirror” is not used, this model reverses the perspective as a mirror reverses what it reflects. There are no more levels for Dante to traverse. He is about to enter the Empyrean, which is not a 10^th level but rather the spiritual perspective that reverses the natural perspective. In the spiritual perspective, God is not an object literally beyond the farthest star, so far away that many people doubt that he exists. Instead, he is the luminous center from which light radiates and is reflected outwardly from level to level, being to being, until it fills everything to a greater or lesser degree, just as was said in canto 1. God paradoxically remains within himself and yet is omnipresent. There is nowhere further for Dante to travel, and from this point it could be said that there are no more events in the narrative, even though what Dante witnesses continues to change. But these are changes of vision. What Dante is looking at does not change: instead, his experience is one of “expanding eyes.” The more light his being absorbs, the more it expands and the more he is able to see. The mode of the poem has changed from active to contemplative.

The active and contemplative are both valid modes of spiritual life, and Dante symbolizes them by two women. In his last night on the mountain of Purgatory, Dante dreams of the Old Testament Leah and Rachel, who had become traditional symbols of the active and contemplative (Purgatorio, canto 27). Rachel is the contemplative one, who does nothing but stare into a mirror, which is equivalent to looking into herself. Yet this is not narcissism, because the self is a mirror reflecting the divine. Later, when Dante enters Eden, he meets a woman, Matilda, who symbolizes the active life. It is she who draws Dante through the waters of Lethe to wash away the memory of his sins. But she is subsidiary to Beatrice, who again symbolizes the contemplative. The final cantos of the Paradiso are Dante’s contemplative vision, and it is a vision of the light. John 1:5 says that the light shines in the darkness, and some modern translations say that the darkness does not “overcome” it. But, as so often, the King James version retains the greater metaphorical complexity: the darkness comprehendeth it not. On one level, to comprehend can mean to contain or include—the darkness cannot swallow the light. But “comprehend” also means to understand. However, although our natural self can never fully comprehend the ultimate mystery, it may still contemplate it, and in doing so be transformed into a spiritual self. In the final lines of the poem, God appears as three circles—and the second circle is said to “mirror” the first, the Son mirroring the Father. The 3^rd, the Holy Spirit, is fire that emanates from the first two.

After his final vision, Dante feels himself falling back to earth, and after these far-reaching reflections, so must we. What can we “comprehend” in these “speculations” that may be humanly accessible, not just abstruse? We are mirrors. Mirrors both receive and give, contain and reflect. We take in what we love, and in doing so form with it a double mirror. Yet we also try to give. In whatever we do—teaching, writing, love—we tell the world: Look. You are beautiful. And you are held.

Correction

If you make a mistake about Harry Potter lore, it’s going to be caught. Well, that’s a good thing, and I’m grateful to be corrected. No, Harry didn’t inherit the Resurrection Stone from his family—he inherited the Cloak of Invisibility. The Resurrection Stone came to him from Albus Dumbledore. Thankfully, I think the point I was making still stands, that Harry resurrects the dead in order to feel supported enough to sacrifice himself and die, in contrast to Voldemort with his hunger for immortality. It’s an honor to be corrected by one of my most gifted former students, Anne Shinoskie, and I give her thanks.

References

Sloterdijk, Peter. Spheres. Volume 1: Bubbles. Microspherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 2011. Originally published 1998.