Holding the cat, I looked in the mirror and was startled. Fluffie’s face is asymmetrical, but I couldn’t have told you which side has this or that feature. (Can you say without looking which was Moshe Dayan’s good eye?) And yet her mirror image was strikingly strange.
I’ve had similar experiences a few times before: seeing my face without glasses or beard; seeing my father in person for the first time in a couple of years. At such moments I see – briefly – what the face ‘really’ looks like, before the reality fades into the familiar symbol. Such abstraction is necessary, of course, but I wonder whether there might be some benefit to lifting the veil more often.