mirrors; twilight

New journal layout, because I quickly get bored of the sight of my own face. If I wanted to look at myself every time I came online I'd put a mirror on top of my computer, although I've always had an irrational fear of the things. There's something about the way they reflect you in reverse that seems sinister, somehow, so you can never know quite what you look like - except in photographs, which usually resemble you even less. At my grandparents' house there's a full-length mirror at the bottom of the stairs, so that as you descend you slowly come into view from the feet up. I remember I used to be terrified of it, struck by the awful dread that what I saw in the mirror wouldn't actually be me but something else, some unnameable thing staring back at me.

Laura told me once that the space inbetween two facing mirrors is a magical field, that strange distortion of light that reflects into infinity, but to me Pratchett's idea always seemed closer to the truth - the endlessly repeating field doesn't so much generate power as consume it, suck out life from the air and the soul from your reflection. That seems oddly relevant to me now, thinking about distorted body image and mirror-obsession, but for once that's got nothing to do it; I just don't think I'll ever be comfortable around them, especially when they're in a room and not being used. I hate the idea of them staring into space, ready to catch your image as you walk past.

The layout is something I made a couple of months ago for a writing site that never went online. Iain and I were walking back from the college gym at dusk sometime in May, and as I looked up through the trees by Lensfield Road the sky was that same neon shade and the moon was perfectly luminous, suspended between the leafy silhouettes of trees. I didn't manage to get a photo because the light had changed by the time I'd fetched my camera, but this image from photonica gets pretty close.

The Latin is from Ovid's Amores, book II, and could be translated:

     Yet you had sworn that you would ever be my companion -
          by me and by your eyes, those stars of mine!
     The words of women, lighter than falling leaves,
          go all for naught, swept away by the whim of wind and wave.


I've got my reading list for next term and it's ridiculously long - nigh on thirty texts in all, and I have no idea how I'm going to get hold of them. Hopefully I can get through some of the Greek by October - I've got the Loeb of the Iliad already, which should keep me going. I miss it, all of it. I wish summer would hurry up and end.