The Hall of Mirrors

I am a watchman upon the wall of the City of the Word, and it is my office to keep the Register of Arrivals. Every pilgrim who comes in at the Heralds’ Gate gives me his name, and the name of the place he came from, and some account of his road, and I write it down. Most of the accounts are short. Pilgrims are tired when they arrive, and they would rather go in than talk to an old man with an ink-pot. But one man sat with me on the wall for seven nights running and told me all of it, and when he had finished I begged him to let me set it down at length. He laughed and said I might, so long as I told it as it happened and not as I would have liked it to happen. I have tried to keep to that. Anyone who knows the road will understand why he asked it of me.

His name, when he came to me, was Inquirer. He was not born with it.

There is a city in the province of Autonomy called Mine-Own-Meaning. I have never been there, but every pilgrim who comes from it describes it in nearly the same words, so I am inclined to believe them.

It is a city of glass. The houses are faced with mirrors, and a man walking down any street there sees himself coming toward himself from both sides at once. The shop windows are mirrors. The fountains are polished basins, so that whoever bends to drink sees his own face rising to meet him. In the great square stands a cathedral whose whole front is a single looking-glass three hundred feet high, and on a bright morning the people gather before it in their thousands to gaze at their own reflection. They call this worship, and they mean it.

I should say plainly that the people of Mine-Own-Meaning are not wicked, at least not as men usually use the word. They are courteous and clean, they pay their debts, and they are sincere to a fault. They would be astonished to hear that anything was wrong with them. What they have is a sickness of the eye, and they have had it so long that they no longer know it for a sickness. From childhood they have looked at nothing but surfaces that hand their own faces back to them, and somewhere along the way they lost the power to see what is not themselves.

Every citizen also wears a pair of spectacles, from the cradle. The lenses are tinted, rose or amber or smoke-grey or a watery green, and the tint is fixed by the household a child is born into, and the street, and the age. No one in that city takes them off. In fact no one knows he has them on. Tell a man there that he sees the world through amber glass and he will answer, “Nonsense. The world is amber.”

The Book is greatly honored in Mine-Own-Meaning. Every house has one. But the copies of that city are made in a particular way. Long ago somebody began backing each leaf with a thin film of silver, so that a reader looking down at the page sees the letters only faintly, and his own face quite clearly behind them. The people say this is the most devout way to read. “For the Book,” they say, “is a mirror of the soul,” and there is just enough truth in the saying to have kept it alive all these years.

Silver tarnishes, though. So the city keeps an honored guild called the Worshipful Company of Polishers, whose whole business is to keep the silvering of every Book bright. A well-polished Book shows its reader his face so kindly that he hardly notices the letters, and he goes away comforted. A Book that has gone dull starts to show more of the letters than the face, and this makes a household uneasy. When a household is uneasy at its reading, it sends for a Polisher.

The man I am writing about was a Polisher, and a good one. As a young man he was called Self-Reader, as his father had been. He served his apprenticeship under the Master of the Company himself, the venerable Lord What-It-Means-To-Me, and by forty he had his own workshop in the Street of Reflections, a wife, two daughters, and a name for the brightest finish in the city. Ladies crossed the river to have their Books done by him. They said that after Self-Reader had been over a page, they could sit with it for an hour and find nothing in it at all but their own lovely thoughts.

He was proud of that, and he told me so without any pleasure.

What undid him arrived in a basket, on a wet afternoon.

An old woman carried it in. She was a stranger, since she wore no spectacles, and that alone set the apprentices staring. She put the basket on his bench and lifted out a Book so old its boards had gone black, with silvering so tarnished it showed no face whatever. “I found it in my late master’s cellar,” she said. “Before he died he told me to take it to the best Polisher in the city. I don’t know why. I only do as I was told.” She would not take a receipt or leave a name, and she went back out into the rain. He never saw her again.

Self-Reader laid the Book open on his bench, took up his finest cloth and his jar of rouge, and began on the first page of Genesis.

The tarnish came away easily enough. He expected bright silver underneath, and his own face. Instead, where age had eaten the silver thin, the letters came through blacker and harder than any he had seen in a Book in that city. They lay close on the page and did not shimmer. They looked cut there.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

He must have read that sentence a thousand times. But he had always read it with his own face floating behind it, and so in his ears it had always come out something like, In the beginning there was me, and I had some thoughts about God. Now his face was gone and the words were simply there, and they were plainly not about him.

He sat without moving long enough that the apprentices asked if he was ill. He sent them home.

He worked on the old Book all that night, though he did not polish it. He did what no Polisher in Mine-Own-Meaning had ever done: he took a fine blade and, with great care, began to scrape the silver off.

When I asked him why, up on the wall, he had trouble saying. The best he could manage was that the black letters had sounded to him like a voice on the other side of a wall. “And when you hear a voice through a wall,” he said, “you want the wall down. That’s all I knew.”

By dawn he had twelve leaves cleared, and he sat reading them by the grey window, skipping from Genesis to the Psalms to the Gospels, wherever the blade had got through. Everywhere he found the same strangeness. The words were addressed. Someone was speaking them to someone, on purpose, about something.

In the Psalms he read, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law,” and it struck him that the man who wrote it had not asked to see himself in the law. He had asked to see wondrous things, and they were to come out of the law, not out of him.

In Proverbs he read, “Every word of God is pure… Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.” He thought of the ladies who left his shop with an hour of their own beautiful thoughts, and he felt ill.

In the Gospel he found the Lord saying to the scholars of His day, “Have ye not read?” Of course they had read. They were the best readers in Israel, and the Lord spoke to them as if they had never opened the scroll. That frightened him more than anything, because he was the best reader of his own kind, and knew it.

Toward morning he went through to the parlor and opened his own Book, the one on the stand, polished like a mirror and admired by every guest. His face looked up at him from behind the faint letters, kind and thoughtful and familiar, and smiling. He found he did not like it. That isn’t the Book, he thought. That’s me, standing in front of the Book, in the way of the light.

And then, the way a man will suddenly hear his own heart beating, he became aware of his spectacles. He put his hand up and felt the rims, cold against his cheekbones. He had never known they were there. The lenses were a deep amber, and he saw that he had never in his life looked at anything that was not amber.

He tried to pull them off. They would not come. There was no glue; they had grown into the bridge of his nose and the backs of his ears, the way a tree grows round a fence wire and takes it in.

He sat down at the bench with his hands over his face and said out loud, “What does this Book say? I’ve made it say a thousand things. What does it say?”

Someone knocked at the shop door, though the sign was turned to Closed. He didn’t answer. The door, which was not locked, opened anyway, and a man came in out of the morning.

He was tall and spare and dressed in the plain black gown of an old minister of the Word. He carried no bag and no tools, only a Book under his arm, and it was like no Book in that city. There was no silver on it anywhere. Its pages were soft with use, and the letters stood on them black and hard, like the letters in the old woman’s Book.

He wore no spectacles either. Two in one day, Self-Reader thought.

“You’ve been scraping,” said the stranger, with a glance at the bench.

“I have. Is it a crime?”

“Here it’s the only crime there is. Elsewhere it’s the beginning of wisdom.” He held out his hand. “My name is Sola-Scriptura. I’m a herald. I go up and down the provinces and I listen at workshop doors, and every so often I hear a blade on silver.”

“Then tell me what’s the matter with me,” said Self-Reader. “I’ve found out the Book speaks, and I’ve found out I’ve never once heard it. And I’ve found these on my face,” he touched the spectacles, “and they won’t come off.”

Sola-Scriptura sat down on the apprentices’ stool and looked at him for some time before he answered.

“Nothing’s the matter with you that isn’t the matter with every man born. The silver is a habit of this city, and of a good many cities. Men go to the Book to find themselves, so they hang a mirror where the window ought to be. The spectacles are something else, and older. Every man reads through lenses. His upbringing, his age, what he loves and what he’s afraid of, what he would very much like to be true. You’ll never get them off in this life, and I’m telling you so now so you don’t waste ten years trying. But they can be corrected. A man can learn the color of his own glass. He can let the Book grind his lenses a little truer, year on year, until he’s seeing more by its light than by his own.”

“How?”

“By going where the Book is heard the way it was spoken.”

“Where’s that?”

The Herald got up and went to the window. The workshop faced north, and beyond the mirrored roofs and the river and the flat country lay a line of low hills. Above them, very far off, there hung a faint steadiness in the sky, a light that was not the sun.

“Do you see it?”

Self-Reader looked. Through his glass it came out amber, like everything else, but it was there, and it did not waver.

“That’s the City of the Word,” said Sola-Scriptura. “In that city the Book is read as its Author meant it, and heard, and obeyed, and spoken again. There’s an old road that goes there, the King’s Highway of Understanding. I won’t pretend it’s easy. Every stage of it will take something from you that you thought you couldn’t do without. But I’ve never met a pilgrim at the far end who didn’t tell me he hadn’t known what reading was until he’d walked it.”

From somewhere in his gown he brought out a small lantern of plain iron with a horn window and set it on the bench, unlit.

“Take this. It burns one oil only, and that’s the Book. Open the Book in front of it and you’ll have light for the next step. Shut the Book and it goes out. If you try to feed it your own oil, your own thoughts and feelings and clever notions, it’ll smoke and blacken and you’ll be worse off than in the dark. And it will never show you more than the next step. Don’t ask it to.”

Self-Reader turned the lantern over in his hands. “Who’ll guide me?”

“I’ll meet you on the road. I walk all of it. You’ll meet others too. Some will be friends, the old principles of right reading. They’ll seem strict to you at first, and later on they’ll seem like the only kind people you ever knew. The rest will be enemies, and there are a great many of them. I’ll warn you now that they’re reasonable people, most of them, and some of them are very learned, and every last one will offer to save you trouble.”

“You talk like a man with authority,” said Self-Reader. “Whose?”

“None of my own. My name means Scripture Alone, and I haven’t a word to say that isn’t written in that Book. I don’t bow to any court above it. Not councils, and not guilds, and not my own heart, and certainly not yours. Councils can err, and plenty have. The heart is deceitful above all things. But all Scripture is given by inspiration of God. The Book is the judge, and every reader stands in front of it, never over it. That’s the whole of my authority, and I’ve never found I needed more.”

With that he went out. Self-Reader ran after him into the street, but there was no one. Only the mirrored house-fronts on either side, showing him a man in amber spectacles holding an unlit lantern.

News moves quickly in a city of mirrors, since everybody is always looking. By noon the whole Street of Reflections knew that Self-Reader had shut his shop, sent his apprentices home, and been seen through the window scraping a Book. By evening a summons had come under the seal of the Worshipful Company, a hand pressed over a heart, and underneath it the motto What It Means To Me.

His wife opened it before he did. Her name was Comfortable-Notion. She was not an unkind woman, and she loved him after her fashion, which was the fashion of the city.

“Husband, what have you done? They’re saying you’ve defaced a Book.”

“I’ve uncovered one.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“It’s the opposite thing.” He tried to show her the old Book, the black letters on the bare pages. She looked, and a crease came between her eyes, and then she looked away quickly, as you might turn your face from a cold draught.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “It doesn’t look at me.”

“No. It looks past you, at Someone else. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

She went to bed early, and he heard her crying through the wall. In the morning she had polished their parlor Book until it blazed, and she was sitting in front of it with a bright, set face, telling herself what it meant to her.

The Hall of the Worshipful Company of Polishers stands at the head of the great square, opposite the glass cathedral. Inside is one long room mirrored on every wall and on the floor and ceiling as well, so that a man standing in it sees himself repeated a thousand times off into a greenish distance, every one of him in the same spectacles.

At the far end on a dais sat Lord What-It-Means-To-Me, old and white-bearded and soft-spoken, with gentle eyes behind rose-colored lenses. With him sat the two Wardens of the Company. One was Mr. Consensus, a broad, prosperous man with an odd gift: when he talked, you seemed to hear behind his voice the murmur of a large crowd agreeing with him. The other was Mr. Felt-Meaning, a long thin scholar who ran the Company’s school in the neighboring town of Relevance. He held a quill and turned it in his fingers the whole time, and wore a small, patient smile.

Self-Reader stood in front of them with the old Book under his arm and the unlit lantern at his belt.

“My dear Self-Reader,” said the Master. “My dear old pupil. We’ve heard such a strange story. They tell us you’ve taken a blade to the silvering of a Book.”

“I have, my lord.”

A sound ran down the hall as a thousand reflections caught their breath.

“But why?” The old man seemed honestly hurt. “The silver is what makes the Book personal. Without it, the Book is only… words. Old words in old languages about old people. With it, the Book becomes yours. Mine. Ours. Each man finds his own meaning, and each meaning is precious. Who are we to call any of them wrong?”

“My lord, if every meaning is right, then the Book has never said anything. And if the Book has never said anything, God has never spoken. I’d sooner hear Him say one thing I don’t like than go on hearing myself say a thousand things I do.”

The Master shook his head slowly. “That is a hard saying.”

Mr. Consensus got to his feet, and the murmur got up with him until it filled the room.

“Neighbor, I’ll put it to you as a plain man. How many people in this city read the Book as we read it? All of them. How many in the towns round about? All, or near enough. How many of the learned in the colleges? More every year. And you, one polisher with a scraped Book and some odd sort of lamp, mean to set yourself against the lot of us? When everyone agrees, who are you to disagree?”

Who indeed, went the murmur, who indeed, and a thousand reflections nodded together.

Self-Reader felt himself getting smaller. He had trusted that murmur his whole life. But he had the old Book against his chest, and he could feel the hard edges of the boards through his coat, and he found he could speak.

“Mr. Warden, there was once a whole nation that agreed, and they made a golden calf and danced round it. There were once four hundred prophets who agreed and one who didn’t, and it was the four hundred who were wrong. There was once a whole city that agreed, and what they agreed on was Crucify him. I don’t say the many are always wrong. Sometimes they’re right. But when they’re right, it’s because the Book says what they say. The Book doesn’t become true because they happen to agree with it.”

He stopped, and then went on, braver than he felt. “And in any case, sir, your thousands don’t agree about the Book. What they agree on is that nobody can be wrong about it. That isn’t agreement. That’s the end of reading.”

The murmur stopped as if someone had cut it with a knife, and for a moment Mr. Consensus’s voice, going on by itself, sounded thin and lonely. He sat down, red in the face.

Then Mr. Felt-Meaning put his quill down and spoke, so quietly that the hall had to lean in.

“I’ve no quarrel with you, friend. I quarrel with no one. You’ve discovered that the Book has an original meaning. Good. We in Relevance have known as much for years. It’s a quaint idea and does no harm. But think it through. That original meaning is shut up in dead languages and dead customs. It takes years to learn, and it’s uncertain at every step. And what’s it for? The farmer’s wife has no need to know what Paul meant to the Galatians. She needs to know what the Book means to her, this morning, in her kitchen. All we’ve done in Relevance is cut out the middle of the road. We go straight from the page to the heart. Isn’t that more useful?”

This was a much cleverer argument, and Self-Reader felt it tug at him, because part of it was true. The Book is for the farmer’s wife, and it is meant to reach her kitchen.

But standing there, his hand happened to fall on the lantern at his belt, and he remembered what the Herald had said: every last one will offer to save you trouble.

“Sir,” he said, slowly, “I do think the Book is for the farmer’s wife. I think it’s meant to reach her kitchen. But if you cut out the middle of the road, it won’t be the Book that gets there. It’ll be you. You go straight from the page to the heart, all right, but you go round the Author to do it, and what reaches the heart is only what was in it already.” He held up the old Book. “If somebody opens a letter and won’t read the words, the letter hasn’t been delivered. It’s only been… held.”

Mr. Felt-Meaning smiled his small smile and wrote something in a notebook. He didn’t argue any further. My own belief is that he had already settled on the place along the road where he meant to try again.

The Master let out a long, soft sigh.

“My dear Self-Reader, we aren’t cruel people. We don’t burn anyone. That would be unkind, and unkindness is the only sin we recognize. So we’ll give you a choice. Give us that Book and we’ll have it re-silvered at the Company’s expense. Put the lantern away. Go home to your wife, who loves you, open the shop on Monday, and polish as you always have, and nobody will mention this again. Or else…”

“Or else?”

“Or else go,” said the Master, and for the first time something hard showed behind the rose-colored glass. “Go and hunt for your one meaning. But you’ll go out of the Company and out of the city both. Your name comes off the Register of Reflections, and no mirror in Mine-Own-Meaning will ever show you your face again.”

Self-Reader looked down the hall at a thousand of himself, every one bowed and frightened and every one in amber spectacles.

Then he looked at the old Book in his arms. The black letters on the scraped pages looked back at him and did not show him his face. It came to him, quite simply, that he would rather be looked at by them than by himself for one more day.

“My lord,” he said, “strike my name.”

They struck it. I’m told the custom there is for the clerk to hold the man’s name up to a mirror and read it out backwards. It was done, and the name came out broken and foreign-sounding, and the hall gave a polite laugh. Then the doors at the far end were opened and he walked out into the square.

It was evening by then. The great glass cathedral was full of sunset, and thousands of citizens stood before it looking at their own gilded faces. Not one of them turned when he went by. Nobody in Mine-Own-Meaning turns to look at anybody else. There’s no need; you have yourself on every side.

He went home. His wife was at her bright Book and wouldn’t look up. The girls were asleep. He stood over them a long time, then kissed them both, wrote a letter, and left it on the mantel. I asked him what the letter said and he wouldn’t tell me. All he would say was that he had promised them he’d come back, and that when he wrote it he had no idea how he was going to keep the promise.

Before dawn he walked to the North Gate. Someone was waiting in the shadow of the gatehouse, a slight young man with a satchel and a cheerful, uncertain face. It was Pliable-Gloss, the cleverest of his old apprentices, who had a knack for putting a fresh bright gloss on any text you liked until it fairly gleamed.

“Master,” said Pliable, “I heard. I’m coming with you.”

“Why?”

Pliable considered. “Because it sounds like an adventure,” he said, honestly enough. “And I’d like to see a Book with no silver on it. It must be awfully… unusual.”

It was not the best reason in the world. But Self-Reader was lonely, and he took it.

They went out through the gate together. As they passed under the arch the gate-mirror showed them both, and then, as they stepped past it, nothing at all. For the first time in his life Self-Reader was standing somewhere with no picture of himself in any direction. There was the grey country, and the road, and the faint steady light over the far hills, and that was all.

He was badly frightened.

He unhooked the lantern from his belt and opened the old Book in front of it, as the Herald had told him, and the first words his eye landed on were these: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”

The lantern lit. It was a small flame, steady and white, the first white thing he had ever seen. For a moment the amber of his lenses seemed to thin, as though the light were coming at him from some side his glass could not cover. It showed him one paving-stone of the road, and then the next one.

Pliable leaned in to look. “Is that all? It’s a very small light.”

“It’s enough for the next step,” said the man. “And I won’t be Self-Reader any more. That was a polisher’s name. Call me Inquirer. I don’t know yet what the Book says. I only know it says something, and I mean to ask it.”

So the two of them set off up the King’s Highway of Understanding, the man of forty who had been born the night before, and the young one who had come along for an adventure. Behind them, high on the city wall, a long thin figure in a scholar’s cap stood watching, turning a quill in his fingers. When they were out of sight he went down the stair to the stables, where a horse was waiting saddled. He knew a shorter way to the place where the road begins to climb.