Date: 1792
"These are the glowing minds that concentrate pictures for their fellow creatures; forcing them to view with interest the objects reflected from the impassioned imagination, which they passed over in nature."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1806
"Thy pure flame / Would light the sense opake, and warm the spring / Of boundless ecstacy; while nature's laws / So violated, plead, immortal-tongu'd, / For her dark-fated children; lead them forth / From bondage infamous!"
preview | full record— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)
Date: 1817, 1818
"'twas her lover's face-- / It might resemble her--it once had been / The mirror of her thoughts, and still the grace / Which her mind's shadow cast, left there a lingering trace"
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: January, 1884
"From the dawn of an individual consciousness to its close, we find each successive pulse of it capable of mirroring a more and more complex object, into which all the previous pulses may themselves enter as ingredients, and be known."
preview | full record— James, William (1842-1910)
Date: January, 1884
"But as the distribution of brain-tension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to another, like the aurora borealis or the gyrations of a kaleidoscope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that the brain's faithful psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, that its rate of chang...
preview | full record— James, William (1842-1910)
Date: 1922
"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."
preview | full record— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)
Date: 1949
"Self-consciousness, if the word is to be used at all, must not be described on the hallowed para-optical model, as a torch that illuminates itself by beams of its own light reflected from a mirror in its own insides."
preview | full record— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)
Date: 1997
"She occupies now an entirely new angular relation to Mercy, to those refusals, among the Living, to act on behalf of Death or its ev'ryday Coercions,--Wages too low to live upon, Laws written by Owners, Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison, Death's thousand Metaphors in the World,--as if, the instant of h...
preview | full record— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)
Date: 2009, trans. 2012
"Everything I saw, faces, bodies ambling through the cabin, stowing their baggage here, sitting down, stowing their baggage there, sitting down, was followed by a reflective shadow that could not desist from telling me that I was seeing this now while aware that I was seeing this, and so on ad ab...
preview | full record— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)
Date: September 27, 2012
"The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer’s fever with every rotation."
preview | full record— Lilla, Mark (b. 1956)