"I remember reading in Mirabell about 'an immense Victorian' mirror and then coming upon the line, 'Here, to this day, it stands,' " recalled Peter Hawkins, the first visiting writer and currently a professor at Boston University.
But potential "big fix" approaches to climate change — constructing immense space mirrors to deflect solar radiation, say — are often derided as science fiction that diverts talent and financing from more plausible solutions.
The largest utility in California, squeezed by rising demand for electricity and looming state deadlines to curb fossil fuels, has signed a deal to buy solar power from seven immense arrays of mirrors, towers and turbines to be installed in the Mojave Desert.
What is abundantly clear, though, is that for every risk there is also an opportunity: the potential disasters that so much dense city living could bring are mirrored by immense opportunities for encouraging healthy living on a scale that has never really been possible before.
On one side the slow Pamunkey, like a mirror, reflected the immense fleet of transports, with their convoy of gunboats.
"The immense sail was taut, its mirror surface sparkling and glittering gloriously in the Sun … Something so huge, yet so frail, was hard for the mind to grasp.
And Jay's ambitions for his writing, which seem to mirror Frey's, are immense: He wants to upend the way people read and write literature.
For a moment, the immense globes of her eyes are convex mirrors in which we might, were this not a picture, witness our own gaze.
As the sun breaks through the clouds, revealing ice-capped peaks, Tell exclaims, "Everything here changes and grows in grandeur!" His son, Jemmy, adds, "In the distance, what an immense horizon!" The change of weather is mirrored in the music.
Using bright yellow fluorescent lights behind a scrim and a mirrored ceiling, it created an immense glowing sun on the end wall of Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall, while also mechanically adding bits of mist and fog to the view.
