MIRRORIBIS

Soul-Shards     Douglas Hofstadter ONE gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to  me, with a note of despair, “What meaning does that photograph have?” "None at all. It's just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It's useless."  The bleakness of my mother's grief-drenched remark set my head spinning  because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way l felt the photograph should be considered.   After a few minutes of emotional pondering - soul-searching, quite literally - I  hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and  which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to  her was along the following ...