a first follow-up

I promised a while back that I would follow up on one particular post, 'mythopoeia.'

I'm not going to do that, just yet.

Just to keep order, instead, I'm going to post a necessary follow-up on the post just before that, 'long time no...'

Why? Chronology is nice. Also, I think I'll be able to relate these two posts sometime in the possibly far future.

And so, here goes. Ben rewrote his parable, and I'm here posting the new version. I'll keep the old around for posterity: It'll make nice contrast, sometime.

The Mirror
a parable by:
Ben Guo

The man looked in the mirror one morning and sensed that something was wrong. It was a vague feeling, and his head was muddled. He tried to ignore the feeling, but it persisted. Finally, the man attempted a closer look at the mirror, pondering, and resolved to shave and exercise more often. But every morning when he looked in the mirror, the feeling that something was not quite right still nagged at him. After a few weeks, he stopped drinking and smoking, in vain. The feeling persisted.

Some months passed, and the man decided that the problem was deeper. He read books and studied. He tried many religions. He tried to find himself. His employers sensed a change in him and his living standard soon improved. But every morning when he looked in the mirror, he was nagged by the same feeling, just as vague as it was when it first appeared to him.

The man continued his routine. His life was good. But he was convinced that something was wrong. He gave to charities, volunteered for community service, but then saw that the problem was greater. It was a problem he couldn’t fix with generosity. There was something wrong with society, and that was what he felt whenever he looked in the mirror. So the man tried to fix the world.

For decades the mirror tormented him, the man laboring every day to fix what he thought was wrong. The man was old now, and so was the mirror. One day, the old man brought home a new mirror. While taking the old mirror down, he realized that its frame was slightly askew. The old man sighed, and placed the mirror back on the wall.

As I said in a comment to Ben, I feel that this new version adds a new layer of meaning, along with a general interpretation that I find more agreeable.

The extra layer of meaning is that he choose to live with his skewed mirror. In the end, after struggling for years to change something, he figured out that that something was simply his point of view, and decided to keep it. This places an emphasis on naming that I like. It's only inherently bad so long as you can't name it. You name it, it's yours, captured, and under control. The man named his mirror, something that's exceptionally hard to do, methinks.

The overall interpretation that sits easier with me is that, in the old version, when he fixed his own point of view, he had "fixed the world." Despite all the good his point of view did for him and the world around him, it was still a flaw. Now, it's not. Now, the world remains unfixed, and we get a good insight into why subjectivity (as the opposite of objectivity) is not necessarily a bad thing.

The one thing that I'm still thinking over is how to reconcile this with the "airline rule." You know how airline safety videos always instruct you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs? I heard a Buddhist monk say, once, that that was what life was like. Learn to love and respect and save yourself. Then you'll be able to help others. In this parable, he helps others before he fully helps himself. I don't necessarily see a contraditiction... Just a lot of food for thought.

I'm going to leave it here for now. I think I have something to say tomorrow, but if my semi-promised follow-up to 'mythopoeia' gets delayed, I'm sorry. Things come up.

-lelandpaul