“In me didst thou exist — and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”
-Edgar Allan Poe, from William Wilson
“You! hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblance, — mon frere!” (translation: “hypocrite reader, — my alias, — my twin!”)
-T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land; via Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal
“As I passed the entrance I thought, What the—? I thought I’d seen something in the dark. I broke out in a sweat. I shined my flashlight at the wall next to the shelf. And there I was. A mirror, in other words. It was just my reflection in a mirror. There wasn’t a mirror there the night before, so they must have put one in between then and now. Man, was I startled. Relieved that it was just me in a mirror, I felt a bit stupid for having been so surprised. So that’s all it is, I told myself. How dumb. I took a cigarette from my pocket and lit it. After a couple of puffs, I suddenly noticed something odd. My reflection in the mirror wasn’t me. It looked exactly like me on the outside, but it definitely wasn’t me. No, that’s not it. It was me, of course, but another me. Another me that should never have been. I don’t know how to put it. It’s hard to explain what it felt like. The one thing I did understand was that this other figure loathed me. Inside it was a hatred like an iceberg floating in a dark sea. The kind of hatred that no one could ever diminish. We stood there, staring at each other. Finally his hand moved, the fingertips of his right hand touching his chin, and then slowly, like a bug, crept up his face. I suddenly realized I was doing the same thing. Like I was the reflection of what was in the mirror and he was trying to take control of me.
Haruki Murakami, from The Mirror
*making people scared of themselves since 1809!
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