Closer than it appears

Drivers touch it twice: once before the engine starts, angling it to a sightline calibrated for a body that will not move again until the destination, and once more, unconsciously, at the first red light, as though the world behind might have rearranged itself in the intervening quarter mile. It rarely has. The mirror itself does the harder work and takes no credit for it, a rectangle of curved glass, slightly convex on the passenger's half in markets that require the warning etched along its lower edge, the one about objects being closer than they appear, which stands as the most quietly unsettling instruction issued to the public by any manufacturer, anywhere. It is not wrong. It is simply the only place in the car willing to say, in writing, that a person's perception of distance cannot be trusted. Of forty-three drivers observed glancing up at a red light, most adjust nothing, the mirror having already been correct; a stubborn handful adjust it anyway, out of habit or doubt. The dot where the mount meets the windshield takes the whole weight of the assembly and never seems to mind. Function is total. Vanity, when it happens, happens here too, briefly, at stoplights, and the mirror allows it and says nothing.

Arthur Pell