Pliny had just changed into a clean pair of jeans. She was going out to a lecture on Snowball Earth, but not for 5 minutes. She thought she would relax. She launched herself backwards crosswise onto the bed, knees up and arms thrown back behind her head. At the same time her eye was arrested by the picture on the wall opposite. It was a framed photograph of the Eiffel Tower under construction in Paris in August 1888.
That, she thought, is an exact mirror of me.
Seconds later she couldn't quite reconcile her own uplifted knees and elbows with the singularity of the Eiffel Tower, which was half built and looked like knees or elbows but not both. Nevertheless she could not shake the feeling that it was the doubling effect that had provoked the metaphor, which had been instantaneous, and not constructed later at her leisure. It was, she decided, that both she and the Eiffel Tower appeared to be performing a backward somersault.
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