“It sometimes seemed to him that he was no longer himself, that he was watching himself act like a stranger, with an attention tinged with dread. He understood perfectly what he was doing; he could even explain it, yet this understanding had no hold on what was taking place within him. Everything happened as if another will—calm, obstinate, reasonable in its own way—were taking the place of his without consulting him. It was neither a hallucination nor a fantasy, but something far more painful because more exact. He recognized every movement, every thought, and yet he no longer found in them that feeling of origin which gives a person the certainty of being the author of his acts. He felt that he was gradually being deprived of the right to say ‘I,’ not by violence, but by a logic so regular that it seemed irrefutable. This division did not present itself as an open conflict; it slipped into the simplest gestures, the most ordinary words, and it was this absence of drama that made it unbearable. He sometimes had the impression that everything within him already knew itself, judged itself, commented upon itself, while he remained behind, reduced to observing. This thought plunged him into a profound anxiety, for it did not even leave him the consolation of error.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double

Notebook of Igniatius

When I am Don Carotte, I know him only in his relation to Sang Chaud. I do not perceive him as what he is within me, but as a companion, almost a witness. Anatole, for his part, appears to me only as what Don Carotte has become, never as what moves within me under this new name. It is as if these parts knew one another, spoke, analyzed one another, without ever granting me access to their point of origin.
This gap frightens me more than I care to admit. I discover a discordance between what I understand and what takes place. I can name things. I can explain them. And yet, at the same time, something acts without consulting me. These are not foreign voices, nor autonomous characters in the dramatic sense of the term. It is more troubling. It is me, without being me as I know myself.
I feel caught in a role-playing game whose rules I have lost. I recognize the masks; I know where they come from; but I can no longer set them aside at will. They do not invade me. They move within me according to a logic that escapes me, and it is precisely this absence of overt violence that disarms me.
I write to you because I fear confusing lucidity with resignation. I could accommodate myself to this situation, give it an acceptable form, integrate it into my discourse as an author. But something in me resists this elegance. I sense that if I continue like this without speaking of it, I risk taking refuge in a justification that would mask my real disarray.
I am not asking you to tell me who I am in all this. I am only asking you to help me understand how to live with this gap between what I know and what I do, between what I name and what acts. I have the feeling that these characters know me better than I know myself, and that thought, as you can imagine, leaves me no peace.
Receive this letter as the sign of an anxiety I can no longer keep at a distance, and as proof that I no longer know very well where the one who writes begins.