‽Bros

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; / I was the smudge of ashen fluff, and I / Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. / And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate / Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: / Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass / Hang all the furniture above the grass / And how delightful when a fall of snow / Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so / As to make chair and bed exactly stand / Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

-Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Nabokov is fascinated by the idea that the self can be multiplied and projected, appearing in more than one place at a time, and perhaps even in a different form. In the above opening lines of Pale Fire, the speaker describes the thrill of the illusion created by reflections; in the windowpane, the image of a room could be seen as existing both around the speaker and transposed on the winter landscape outdoors. In Despair, the protagonist is confronted with a man who is his physical double but unlike him in every other way. In Lolita, Humbert is pursued by a man who embodies the full acceptance of his own appetitive desires and depravity–of course, Humbert Humbert, by name, is inherently duplicitous.

When we are faced with desires that seem to oppose one another, the self cleaves in order to preserve a consonant self-concept. Vasiliy, above, came to the USA from the Ukraine as a child. He mentally carries a version of himself who never left Ukraine, and who informs the decisions he now makes as an American. Due to the countries’ differing economies, the price of a cocktail with friends can seem like a betrayal to that other self. However, he has recently decided to allow his social spending and the concern for his family’s financial situation abroad to co-exist. To allow two opposing concepts of the self to merge is a brave and difficult thing; as nature abhors a vacuum, the human brain abhors dissonance within itself, and will take drastic measures to resolve it.

Sometimes the solution is a dishonest one. I once had the surreal experience of reading back over an old diary from years before, and coming upon a lie; I had said I’d gone shopping with two people to whom, in reality, I had never once spoken. The most likely explanation is that I wished so much to be friends with the people in question that I had created a little lore for the moment, but the flaws of time and memory present another, irresistible possibility: that somehow I had at once been the person who had never spoken to these people, and the person who had met them at the mall every weekend.