Below lay orchards of walnut and fruit trees, and the hot, dry summers passed quietly through the valley. Tao House commands this perspective, but the rooms in which O Neill lived shut it away. The living-room windows were small and widely spaced. Such light as they admitted was broken by reflections in a large blue mirror on the opposite wall, so that the room had a sub-aqueous quality. In his small study, O Neill again shut out light and separated himself from the domesticity of the house by three doors that isolated him in a soundless world.
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
O Neill had entered the cell of self before. As Dion Anthony, he had locked himself in it with Brown his mirrored image. The play was premonitory, and now in the mind, he moved in such a cell for the remainder of his time. Metaphorically, there were two cells. In the first, the outer cell, the mirrors gave on the past.