The Double
Suggested or inspired by mirrors, the surface of still water, and twins, the concept of the Double is common to many lands. It seems likely that statements such as Pythagoras’ “A friend is another myself” and Plato’s “Know thyself” were inspired by it. In Germany, it is called the Doppelgänger; in Scotland, the fetch, because it comes to fetch men to their death. Meeting oneself was, therefore, most ominous; the tragic ballad “Ticonderoga” by Robert Louis Stevenson recounts a legend on this theme. We might also recall that strange paiting by Rossetti called “how They Met Themselves” – two lovers meet themselves at dusk in a forest. One need only mention other instances in Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky, and Alfred de Musset.
For the Jews, on the other hand, the apparition of the Double was not a foreshadowing of death, but rather a proof that the person to whon it appeared had achived the rank of prophet. This is the explanation offered by Gershom Scholem. A tradition included in the Talmud tells the story of a man, searching for God, who met himself.
In Poe’s story “William Wilson”, the Double is the hero’s conscience; when the hero kills his double, he dies. In the poetry of William Butler Yeats, the Double is our “other side”, our opposite, our complement, that person that we are not and shall never be.
Plutarch wrote that the Greeks called the king’s representative the “other I”.
(Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, 2005)
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