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“Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.”

• Sylvia Plath, excerpt from Mirror (1961)

In this poem, Plath’s mirror takes the form of a shiny and exacting truth-teller, reflecting back the image of her aging face each day, swallowing her youth in its watery mouth. The everyday act of looking into reflective surfaces to check oneself is age-old and matter of course. Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972) documents a city named Valdrada, built so high above a lake that the inhabitants exist simultaneously with their reflection: “nothing exists or …