Indeed, for all its metaphoric content, Ms. Horn's work functions most powerfully as a mirror for the viewer, an unclassifiable experience that can't be reduced to words and serves as a stimulus to self-reflection.
Hank's reaction to this sudden awful burst of knowledge fuels this first episode, reflecting more powerfully than any broken mirror ever could the terrifying chasm between perception and reality.
The title "A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion" comes from an editorial in The New York Daily Mirror written by Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and it too is powerfully evocative of the overstatement that this murder case provoked.
The merging and sparring of 15th-century trombone and violin with the ancient stringed zheng and piped sheng, heard most powerfully in the finale by the New York-based composer Huang Ruo, seemed to mirror the turmoil within the Catholic Church this Christmas.
In that, the archbishop, knowingly or unknowingly, was calling to mind the great Hassidic masters, particularly the Baal Shem Tov and Rebbe Nachman of Bretslov, both of whom called us to love our enemies, to pray for those whom we despise, and most powerfully, when we see evil in others, use it as a mirror to see what is wrong with ourselves.
In the storefront window, before a backsplash of beveled mirror subway tiles, a geyser of yellow chiffon ruffles stands powerfully atop a shiny black Louis XV table: cabriole legs astride a field of red lacquer.
It's hard not to think, also, of Carver's "Cathedral," but in the end I'm reminded most powerfully of Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood," with Quatro's unchurch as a mirror image of Hazel Motes's Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.
Powerfully mysterious, too.
