Chapter Sixteen: The Afternoon the Self Went

Chapter Sixteen: The Afternoon the Self Went

Plural I want to describe a specific afternoon because it is the most precise moment I can point to where the philosophical deterioration became experiential — where the question of identity stopped being a midnight abstraction and became something I was living inside. I was in the college canteen. It was an ordinary afternoon. The kind of afternoon that should register as ordinary and does not. I was sitting with people I knew — classmates, the geography of the usual lunch table, the comfortable noise of a group of young people doing what young people do when they are together and not required to do anything in particular. Someone said my name. Hur. Just my name, calling my attention to something. And I felt — and this is the thing I have tried to describe to people and mostly failed — I felt the name arrive from outside and look for the person it belonged to and find, briefly, no one home. Not literally. I was there. I was physically present, sitting at the table, holding my tea. But the name arrived and the person it was calling did not immediately answer from the inside. There was a gap between the name and the response that was probably invisible from the outside — a fraction of a second, a normal processing delay — and from the inside was an abyss. Who is Hur. The question again. But different now. Not theoretical. Not midnight philosophy. The question in the middle of an ordinary afternoon at a canteen table with people saying my name.

I answered. I said something. The conversation continued. But I was watching myself say it from slightly above and to the left. I was both the person saying the thing and the person watching the person say the thing. Both of them were me. Neither of them was entirely present.

This is what Kafka's Gregor Samsa feels, I think. Not the transformation into an insect — that is the metaphor, not the thing. The thing is this: waking up inside a life that no longer maps onto the self that is supposed to be living it. The life continues its normal operations. The world of the apartment, the office, the obligations, the family — all of it continues exactly as before. The catastrophe is entirely interior, which makes it, in some ways, more total. There is nothing to point to. There is no evidence. There is only the growing gap between the person you were and the person performing the person you were, and the question of whether these two things have always been the same thing or whether, at some specific juncture, they diverged. I went home that evening and sat at my desk and opened my textbook and stared at it for forty minutes without reading it. Then I read it. The reading was fine. The words went in. The knowledge accumulated. The machine continued to produce acceptable outputs. Somewhere inside the machine, a light was on that shouldn't have been on, and a different light was off that should have been on, and I did not have the manual to know what either of them meant or how to address them.