Doppelgänger

Is it ... me? (The Bus 4.40)

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The Stop

In contemporary usage, a doppelgänger (from the German ‘double goer’ or ‘double walker’) is ‘someone who looks exactly like someone else but who is not related to that person.’ The belief in the ‘existence of a spirit double, an exact but usually invisible replica of every man, bird, or beast’ is ‘ancient and widespread,’ and it was often thought meeting one’s double meant one’s death was imminent. Despite the idea of a biologically unrelated double of a living person existing for centuries, the word wasn’t coined until 1796 when it appeared in the German Romantic writer Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs. Since then, the idea has been a staple of literature.¹

‘How They Met Themselves’/Dante Gabriel Rossetti/1864/Public Domain

The ancient Egyptians believed the soul had multiple parts, one of which was the ka - a sort of ‘doubled’ spirit identical to the body and able to survive death to reside in a picture or statue of a person. Throughout Europe and parts of Africa, ‘supernatural’ children known as changelings were often believed to have been left in the place of their identical human infants, and the Norse believed in the vardøger - a double that appeared in a place before the original person arrived in order to lead others to believe the person was already present. German folklore contains stories about ‘wraith[s] or apparition[s]’ of living people, and in 18th and 19th century British literature there are many stories told about the fetch - an ‘ethereal double’ who appeared, like the doppelgänger, to signal the death of the person it copied.

For obvious reasons, the doppelgänger became popular in horror literature, and the idea - ‘perfectly suited for exploring human duality’ and often personifying a character’s darker side - took on considerable complexity. In Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale ‘The Shadow’ (1847), a man’s shadow suddenly separates from his body and gradually becomes his ‘walking double,’ embodying his opposite physical and moral traits, and eventually replacing him. A similar theme runs through - and is actually the entire point of - Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double (1846), the doppelgänger is the bold, assertive opposite of a normally mild and antisocial government clerk. Encroaching on every aspect of the clerk’s personal life, the double eventually drives him insane by the end. driving him mad by the story’s end.²

In addition to their existence in myth, folklore and literature, reports of doppelgänger sightings can be found throughout history. For example, in 1612 the English metaphysical poet John Donne reportedly saw his wife’s doppelgänger pass by him twice, ‘her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms.’ In distress, Donne sent a messenger to check on his wife and discovered that in fact she was in ‘very poor health after losing their child.’ The German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described seeing his doppelgänger (in ‘unfamiliar attire’) on horseback - and years later found himself on the same road wearing the coat of his double. The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley not only included a double in Prometheus Unbound, but claimed to have met his doppelgänger shortly before his death in 1822, and no less a rational figure than Abraham Lincoln reportedly met his doppelgänger three times during his Presidency.

Various psychological explanations have been identified to explain the existence of doppelgängers, including heautoscopy - a condition in which a person ‘hallucinates their own image at a distance.’ Though a good explanation for the phenomenon, the problem remains that auto-hallucination doesn’t explain those cases when the doppelgänger is observed by others, but recent research may have the answer.

Since 1999, Canadian photographer François Brunelle has travelled the world photographing strangers who look nearly identical to one another. Researchers asked 32 pairs of his subjects questions about their lifestyles and to submit samples of their DNA, and facial recognition software analysed the subjects’ headshots to ‘quantify similarities among their faces.’ In the end, half of the pairs were given ‘twin-like scores’. After taking into account lifestyles and behaviours, the researchers concluded that the existence of doppelgängers is actually down to nothing more mysterious than ‘genetic overlap … by happenstance.’ In a growing population, there are only so many genetic permutations, and as the ‘human population is now 7.9 billion, these look-alike repetitions are increasingly likely to occur.’ Presumably, in the smaller, provincial and - frankly - classist gene pool of the previous centuries, the odds for genetic overlap were even higher.

The Detour

Today’s Detour is to The LAST Eclipse in History, a short (4:30) film from minutephysics which - with some lovely low-fi illustrations - explains how solar and lunar eclipses work, and why we’ve reached (as a planet) peak eclipse quality. Worth a watch, if you’re even remotely interested in this stuff.

The LAST Eclipse in History

The Recommendation

Today’s Recommendation is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).³ A dystopian science-fiction novel set in an alternative ‘late 1990s, England,’ the novel tells the story of three friends growing up together in a strictly-run boarding school. We learn the children are actually clones of unnamed and unseen wealthy individuals for whom their organs will be harvested when later required, an inescapable fate that conflicts with what they learn about themselves - and the limited experience they have with the world. The novel is remarkable, and its tone of resigned unease eerily masks the true horror of the events that unfold. Highly recommended.

From the back: In one of the most acclaimed and original novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and he closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

Never Let Me Go (Guardian Review)

The Sounds

Today’s playlist is unrelated to today’s Stop - just five great tracks that have found their way to my playlist:⁴ ‘What Kinda Music’ (Tom Misch, 2020), ‘Kayleigh’ (Marillion, 1985), ‘Sweet and Low’ (Fugazi, 1993), ‘Echo Beach’ (Martha and the Muffins, 1980) and ‘Meladori Magpie’ (The Smashing Pumpkins, 1995). Enjoy!

The Thought

Today’s Thought is from Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009). I thought its sentiment somewhat appropriate, given today’s Stop:

‘What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.’

If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:

And that’s the end of this Stop - I hope you enjoyed the diversion!

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Until the next Stop …

1. Sources for today’s Stop include Jean Paul (Britannica), Doppelganger (Cambridge), Doppelganger (Britannica), Doppelganger (Wikipedia), History of Doppelganger (Atlas Obscura) and Doppelgangers (Smithsonian).

2. An earlier example of a double who is better than its original is in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘William Wilson,’ wherein the doppelgänger appears to exist ‘solely to ruin the narrator’s life.’ While attending a school in England, the young Wilson meets a child with the same name and appearance. From the start, the double is a ‘source of frustration … and appears throughout Wilson’s life to thwart his ambitions.’ However, instead of being Wilson’s negative counterpart, it’s the doppelgänger who is morally upright, while the original Wilson is ‘nefarious, motivated by lust and greed.’

3. Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist ‘known for his lyrical tales of regret fused with subtle optimism.’ The winner of numerous prizes, including the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day (1989), in 2017 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the committee citing his works that ‘uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.’ For more information, see: Kazuo Ishiguro (Britannica).

4. I must credit my daughter, Alice, with introducing me to the Tom Misch track - as mentioned previously, she has excellent taste, and this suggestion just reinforces that fact. ‘Kayleigh’ is on my regular playlist because Ian Sharp (of LP) recently did a feature on the song's parent album, Misplaced Childhood which reintroduced me to a brilliant piece of prog rock. The Fugazi track is, well, Fugazi - which is enough said. I love ‘Echo Beach’ because it reminds me of The Go-Gos, a band I loved when I was in the 6th grade (I went to Roses and bought ‘Beauty and the Beat’ on 45 on the last day of school, having no clue ‘Echo Beach’ had been released a year before) and ‘Meladori Magpie’ has forever been in my Top Ten Smashing Pumpkins list.