Narcissus, having spurned the love of the nymph Echo, falls in love with the beauty of his own unrecognised reflection, seeks to embrace it, and drowns.
It is easy to see this ancient fable as a simple moral warning against excessive self-love and its eventual perils. But that would be to miss the two vital details which I have just narrated in the briefest possible compass. Narcissus has refused the obsessively mimetic and he is lured not by fondness for his own mirror-image, like a Dorian Gray, but precisely by his failure to recognise that image in the seemingly alien medium of fluid nature.
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