More mirror than window is such an eloquent way to put it. The more direct the light we shine upon one another, the more we see ourselves reflected there. That light is to loud, too insistent, too focused to learn much about them, leaving us to perceive ourselves shown back at us.
In the book, John Green’s protagonist is left with clues that are tangled up in a highlighted copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. So, as Quentin slowly comes to truly understand the poem, like Whitman, he comes to know that what he sees in others is mostly their outer husks, distorting his own expectations of them like a fun house mirror.
To know someone else, you have to see them in their own light, which can be quite different from our own. It is so tempting to add our light to theirs, but as we do, that results in a pollution that drowns out their constellations. We add only noise and wind up creating distance in our attempt to know them.
I think it is difficult to avoid this mismatch of knowing, especially in the beginning, when there is so little known and we fill in the blanks with bits of ourselves. And, as long as we don’t cling too tightly to those assumptions when they are replaced with shared, learned experience, things usually work out.
So, I breathe. I quietly take a moment and try to see by the light of others.