Daryush Shayegan relates the following anecdote:"...Corbin was extremely sensitive to the topography of Iran, he saw it as the terrestrial and sensible form of the mundus imaginalis. I remember a trip we took together to Isphahan. We were settled in a little lunchroom of the Hotel Shah-Abbas, which reproduced, after a fashion, the small empty niches of the music room of the Palace of Ali Ghapou. In the walls and the partitions there were cut out of the emptiness innumerable small silhouettes of vases, flasks, laces of cuttings of all the forms conceived by an overflowing imagination. It gave to the space a sensation of levitation, the feeling that everything was in suspension. Everything seemed to be an apparition, vanishing as in a dream. I saw Corbin rise, his eyes lit by an interior gaze, then he took me by the arm, and led me to one of these empty niches, said to me in a voice soft and sensual, 'This is the phenomenon of the mirror, put your hand into this space and you will touch no form there; the form is not there: it is elsewhere, elsewhere...'"
From Daryush Shayegan, Henry Corbin: La topographie spirituelle de l'Islam Iranien, Paris: Ed. de la Difference, 1990, 23-24 (trans. T. Cheetham).