Other people's reflections, as I thought then.
They are impressionistic night scenes, denuded of people, capturing reflections and the play of light.
Off we all waddle to the noise of Hoi An's midnight-working scissored hands, people checking reflections in mirrors.
As Evelyn Waugh observed, "Nobody wants to read other people's reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting".
He writes lyrics in which people find reflections of their everyday experience of love and fear and embarrassment, and he permits them to laugh at their vanities, as he laughs at his own.
I'm not religious, and I don't particularly want to be, but I'd like to read more about other people's reflections on coming to some sort of early, weird form of faith in a "higher being" as an emotional survival tactic.
His method was that of Theophrastus: to define qualities such as dissimulation, flattery, or rusticity and then to give instances of them in actual people, making reflections on the "characters," or "characteristics," of the time, for the purpose of reforming manners.
He added: "Nobody wants to read other people's reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting, and will become more so as conditions change with the years".
In a qualitative study, we might view 'recall bias' through a different lens as the 'benefit of hindsight' and consider people's reflections on how they made sense of their symptoms and why they acted, or delayed acting.
It's true that things you say about other people are reflections of what you think of yourself.
