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… Nos conocemos demasiado, inseparable hermano.
[… We know each other too well, inseparable brother.]
—Jorge Luis Borges: "El centinela, " from El Oro de los
Tigres, 1972.
UPON AWAKENING, A MAN WHO HAS dreamt of being a butterfly wonders whether he is not a butterfly dreaming of being a man.
In this paradox, ontology merges with epistemology: being and knowledge cannot be separated. Indeed, all knowledge is being and is about being. As in the Socratic Know Thy Self carved on the pediment of the Delphi temple, all we really want to know is who we are, a wish which is related to our infantile sexual curiosity—never entirely satisfied—about our origins.
It is, perhaps, because none of us can be absolutely certain about our identities that we are all vulnerable to experience gaps in our sense of continuity in time and space and to the sensation of not being ourselves. The uncanny sensation of not being oneself is so common in its numerous forms that probably all human beings experience it at some point in their lives. Yet—like the memory of a vivid dream vanishing early in the morning, just when one felt closest to grasping it—its ultimate essence must escape us.
Literature, philosophy and psychology have made countless attempts to portray and conceptualize such phenomena, as they seem not only to have a universal quality, but also to be at the very foundation of our existence.
I shall just mention here some of the many shapes in which these experiences can manifest themselves: depersonalization, of which