I'd like to read the accounts of contemporary curmudgeons bemoaning the way young Greeks are clamoring for mom's mirror, and how you should limit your kids to no more than one twelfth of a day of mirror time, setting the clepsydra if necessary.
I'd like to read the accounts of contemporary curmudgeons bemoaning the way young Greeks are clamoring for mom's mirror, and how you should limit your kids to no more than one twelfth of a day of mirror time, setting the clepsydra if necessary.
Or even today, the rediscovered idea of separating the sink (and mirror) from the toilet, so preeners aren't holding up the flow.
Makes you wonder if mirrors have been a net negative on civilization, for its acceleration of vanity.
Yeah, for sure! I mean, Narcissus is in the public consciousness there to back up your idea.
It's an interesting idea: that a piece of tech can represent one thing and have certain moral sensibilities that form around it, and then some innovation or something changes our relationship with it (in this case, puts it on a wall in every bathroom).
Maybe it changed us in ways we can't fully know! Maybe commoditizing the mirror largely robbed it of its power. Or maybe we're all a bunch of narcissists in ways we can't comprehend because we don't have the anti-mirror people out there scolding us.
Before mirrors, people would say there was something stuck in your teeth and you had to just believe them.
::inspired by this comment, drafts a thousand word blog post about the decay of teeth, and social trust::