61: Critical Review of Tom Barone’s Touching Eternity

I watched the fireflies [Barone’s words] painting in watercolor on a gigantic canvas, their speckled phosphorescent moments of light diffused and softened by the mist [of my reflections]. (Barone, 2001, p. 15 with reviewer’s inserted comments)

In his book, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, Robert Fulgham (1989) describes a chance encounter that he had with a broken bicycle mirror and the pleasure that he experienced as he attempted to use it to reflect light into inherently dark places (pp. 173-175). As I contemplated that story, I realized that the books that we read function, in many ways, just as that broken mirror did for him. They provide us with opportunities to reflect—shedding light on many of our own essential qualities, core beliefs, and perceptions of who we pretend to be, of who we are, and of who we want to become. In this way, they allow us to examine ourselves from new perspectives and with increased insight and objectivity. As with any reflection, what the viewer sees depends on the size and shape of the mirror, and like most mirror images, what we see is not necessarily a complete or accurate representation of that which is being reflected. Even so, such reflections do—like the bicycle mirror—illuminate corners of our true selves that might otherwise remain hidden in the shadows of our misconceptions, insecurities, and selfimposed boundaries.