Is the self a story we tell ourselves in order to tie the “bundle of partly autonomous systems” we call our minds into a coherent story? Does that mean the “I” we call “me” is nothing but an apparition in the mirror of language?
(Part Two of a multi-part essay. Part One, “The Thing in the Mirror: What Depersonalization Taught Me About the Strangeness of the Self and the Weirdness of the World,” is here.)
Jorge-Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer of philosophical fictions, had a pathological fear of mirrors.
They seemed to lie in wait in every dimly lit room in the rambling, shabby-genteel house he grew up in, in Buenos Aires’s Palermo neighborhood. Caught off-guard, he’d be startled by the sight of his looking-glass doppelgänger mocking his movements in a me-and-my-shadow pantomime whose slyly insinuated threat — that the Double might someday replace him once its impression was indistinguishable from the real thing — laid a chilly finger on his spine.
Mirrors were spookiest at nightfall, he recalls, in his microfiction “Covered Mirrors”:
As a child, I knew that horror of the spectral duplication or multiplication of reality, but mine would come as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it began to grow dark outside, the constant, infallible functioning of…
