I interpret literature, or reflect on philosophical ideas, in an exploratory manner. The focus here is on developing insights, and some of it is speculative. Occasionally, I consolidate it into longer essays.
[Note: This post has been superseded by an updated and more integrated article.] We have already seen two roles that mirrors play in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet: they indicate a certain self-awareness (a ‘reflectiveness’, we might say with a somewhat tired pun) in a character, and they expose a distance, even separation between their inner worlds when they interact. In other words, Durrell has...
[Note: This post has been superseded by an updated and more integrated article.] ‘Mirror’ is one of Durrell’s words; mirrors are one of his images: they appear throughout the Alexandria tetralogy, in various functions. 1. When the narrator’s relationship with Melissa starts, her previous lover is jealous (to the point of following him around with a pistol in his coat). The two men fall into a...
When reading a book that uses poetic language, we might stumble from time to time over a sentence: though inconspicuous at first, still something about the metaphor seems not quite right. And closer inspection can then reveal a surprisingly deep idea behind a simple choice of phrase.
What is the difference between mysticism and a belief in magic?
In the final round of the 2010 Masters golf tournament, two commentators were surprised, for a brief moment, about a mysteriously unsuccessful putting stroke. And then the replay revealed what really had happened.
We might read the whole of Abenteuer as a gradual realization, on the part of the protagonist, of the consequences of running away from the party, i.e. losing the social connections that provide a route of self-knowledge (by way of others “holding up a mirror”).
The workings of our social environment are so close before our eyes that we often don’t even notice them; but many of them profoundly shape what we perceive as “reality”. It has proved fruitful to understand this along the lines of an analogy: social interactions share many characteristics with theatrical performances. Thus social interactions are enacted, as if on a stage, and “reality” is of...
What we see, when looking into the symbolic mirror, are those parts of ourselves which we would normally avoid to look at, and which we carefully also hide from others. These are part of the personal unconscious and make up, in Jungian terminology, our “shadow”. The false face that we show ourselves and the outside worlds (as long as we ignore the shadow), is called the “persona” (in the ancient...
Mirrors, when they appear in a story, can symbolize something very interesting: namely, a special way of knowing something about a person. What makes it special is that others can know this about us, whereas we ourselves may not know it. Let’s see if we can explicate the idea in a non-symbolic manner: can we give an account of this special type of self-knowledge without recourse to a story (where...
Part of the job, when researching an interesting phenomenon, is to build up a phenomenological pool: collect typical examples, interesting special cases, and fringe phenomena that may or may not be relevant in conjunction with our focus of interest. With synchronicities, there is an additional category in that pool to which we might pay some attention.
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.