"The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face"
About this Quote
Bishop’s line is a journalist’s rebuke to the entire fortune-telling industry of politics, punditry, and personal optimism. Calling the future an “opaque mirror” flips the usual metaphor on its head: we don’t gaze forward and see new worlds; we stare into a surface that only reflects us back, blurred. The punch isn’t that the future is unknowable (a truism), but that the very act of trying to know it turns into self-portraiture. Prediction becomes projection.
The “dim outlines” matter. Bishop isn’t describing a clean reflection, the kind that flatters. He’s describing the low-contrast face you get in bad light: fear smudged into certainty, worry mistaken for wisdom. That’s the subtext: the people most eager to “see” what’s coming are often the ones least able to separate external reality from internal anxiety. The future, in this formulation, is a psychological Rorschach test with the same result every time: your own apprehensions staring back.
Contextually, Bishop wrote across decades when modern America industrialized its forecasts: polling, Cold War scenario planning, market prophecy, the professionalization of expertise. His metaphor punctures that confidence without resorting to anti-intellectualism. It’s not “experts are useless,” it’s “experts are human,” and humans carry their age and worry into every supposedly objective horizon scan.
The intent is both cautionary and faintly comic: the future isn’t hiding from you; you’re in the way.
The “dim outlines” matter. Bishop isn’t describing a clean reflection, the kind that flatters. He’s describing the low-contrast face you get in bad light: fear smudged into certainty, worry mistaken for wisdom. That’s the subtext: the people most eager to “see” what’s coming are often the ones least able to separate external reality from internal anxiety. The future, in this formulation, is a psychological Rorschach test with the same result every time: your own apprehensions staring back.
Contextually, Bishop wrote across decades when modern America industrialized its forecasts: polling, Cold War scenario planning, market prophecy, the professionalization of expertise. His metaphor punctures that confidence without resorting to anti-intellectualism. It’s not “experts are useless,” it’s “experts are human,” and humans carry their age and worry into every supposedly objective horizon scan.
The intent is both cautionary and faintly comic: the future isn’t hiding from you; you’re in the way.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
|---|
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