When I was a kid, one of my former elementary school teachers published a book of poems, “Through a Glass Darkly”. We owned a copy and I read through it several times, so fascinated that someone we actually knew had a book published. It was like we knew a celebrity. I loved the title of the book and I only recently realized that my kid brain had misinterpreted it – I thought a “Glass Darkly” was a noun, a sort of darkened pane of glass. No…apparently “darkly” is an adverb for the unseen verb that the title is extracted from: “…for now we SEE through a glass darkly…” But at any rate, like a lot of childhood experiences the erroneous term firmly implanted and remains even though I know it’s technically incorrect. I just love the sound of it, “Glass Darkly”, and the image of a sort of dark mirror one is gazing into. 

The line is from the bible (one of Paul’s letters) and describes the concept that we (humans) have an imperfect and perhaps distorted view of reality. 

Nowadays it puts me in mind of all of us staring at our screens, the modern day “glass darkly” as it were. Transfixed and spellbound.