Am I really like that?

The purest statement of the mirrored case ever written, and it is four lines of dialogue rather than an argument. Basil Hallward has painted the man he loves and the painting will not age, and when the original walks over to the canvas and asks the only question that matters - 'Am I really like that?' - the painter answers 'Yes; you are just like that' and then, 'At least you are like it in appearance. But it will never alter.' The real man is standing right there. He is also the wrong one. Wilde's book is about a portrait that takes the ruin instead, and the two sentences above are why anybody wants it: every bond on this site wants the other end to be permanent, and here is a version where permanence is available and it is attached to the wrong object. Dorian's own side of it is the jealousy that names the mechanism exactly - 'I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it.' He wants to be the copy. The most damning detail is a mirror. Having seen the cruelty in the painted mouth, he takes up a glass and looks at his own red lips to check, and they are fine: 'No line like that warped his red lips.' The mirror is the one witness that could have settled it and it exonerates him. He is not permitted to be the evidence about himself. That is what the third axis calls mirrored - the figure supplied by the person attached to it, edited toward what the attachment needs, with the original never consulted - and Wilde wrote it in 1890, a hundred and thirty years before anybody had a word for it. First published in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, the only novel Wilde ever wrote.