The Mirror Crack'd

And moving through a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.

Take a look out of your window for a moment.

Thanks. Whatever you are looking at is outside. You are insulated. You are insulated from the sound, the smell and the weather. If you forget the sound, the smell and the feel of what is outside, you have only to open your window or, failing that, open the door and go forth.

As an erstwhile sailor and owner of various boats, there is a very special feeling you get when you are tucked up in bed, in a conventional dwelling, on a stormy night. I have been on boats during hurricanes and there is inevitably a kind of moment when you know you are very much alive.

Consider, also, the long drive in a comfy car. Outside it is raining and the wipers are working like the machine operators in "Metropolis". At that point, you are doing 60, or 70 or 80 and you are cruising down the highway, but you are a cross-headed screw away from sitting by the side of the kerb with not enough weather gear, waiting for the recovery man, who by some amazing chance cannot make the promised turn-out time because the day has a "y" in it.

You probably go for walks, and unless you have a dog the reason is the same for us all; we desire the wind on our faces, the feeling of those muscles working, the delight of new and old vistas and panoramas. In a nutshell, we desire to feel alive. Some of us court danger - controlled danger, and perhaps, fear. We are not all adrenaline junkies but somehow we wish to assert ourselves and experience the limits of existence.

And yet.

And yet, many of us spend hours in front of the television. And Television is not a window, it is a mirror. And a cracked, warped fairground kind of mirror, fit only for laughing at ourselves in and good only for a momentary flight from reality.

The title of course, comes from Tennyson's "Lady of Shallott" (I come from his county of birth and grew up among his vistas and panoramas).

According to Wikedpedia:

"Critics have suggested that The Lady of Shalott is a representation of how Tennyson viewed society; the distance at which other people are in the lady's eyes is symbolic of the distance he feels from society. The fact that she only sees them through a window pane is significant of the way in which Shalott and Tennyson see the world—in a filtered sense. "

She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
            She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
            The Lady of Shalott.

Part IV

In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
            Over towered Camelot;