Thursday 27 February 2020

On Reflections


3 February 2020

At the bottom of a drawer, I found a mirror from Norway, given me as a child. It had nothing to reflect there: decades of happenings passed it by. Typically a mirror should reflect yourself; this reflected only the wood. If the mirror gave a Norwegian reflection, would another give a different national reflection? Or do nations reflect?
How do we know what happened? What is actually happening or what will happen? Is it the responsibility of facts to convince? Do we scrutinize motivations with a scrubbing-brush?
There are witnesses. Witnesses, as anyone who works in court will tell you, vary in reliability, suitability, and being in the wrong place at the right time. Mary Magdalene is the most reliable witness we have, though she wouldn’t have been allowed to testify in court. It’s not who you saw; it’s who you are.
Many arguments, political or religious, fail to reflect their surface subject. In the end, they’re about something called “plain sense”. Overriding scholarship, scientific analysis, history or philosophy, “plain sense” derives from the interpretation of a dominator. It reflects himself, his view of the bottom of the drawer. It’s plain only to those who buy it.

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