Reflection

Use in the book

The autobiographical narrative distinguishes childhood experience from its mature interpretation. The lesson of the populated dining room is identified as a reflection made long afterward: the child’s delight precedes the account of why persons and affection are indispensable. Such retrospective reasoning is part of the recovery of innocence.

In the optical register, benefits return as praise, and the soul resembles a mirror receiving and returning divine light. Yet the mirror is not an exhaustive account of agency. Traherne explicitly insists that the soul can originate its own acts of love, including irregular ones. Reflection thus supplies a powerful image of reception and response, while the later argument prevents that image from reducing a person to a passive surface.

Places to read

1. III.22A later reflection interprets the childhood experience of an empty and then animated room.
2. II.94Praises return received benefits as reflected beams.
3. IV.84The mirror models the soul’s reception and return of love.
4. IV.85The soul is declared a real fountain, more than a mirror.

In this edition

Keep the qualification that the reflection came long afterward: the mature explanatory account is not presented as the child’s fully articulated thought.