Famous literary doppelgangers include Mr. Hyde, William Wilson, the picture in Dorian Grey's attic, Leggatt, and Golyadkin Jr. In film, there are the sisters, or twins, Kate and Patricia Bosworth, both played by Bette Davis and no doubt many more that I don't know or remember that professional movie historians could add. Doubles abound in the world of make-believe, but also occur in "real life." I've had two doppelgangers of my very own. They are not official or clinical doubles but they definitely manifest or "outer" fears that are embedded in the less accessible parts of my brain -- they're my own personal Sir Smiles. They have haunted me because they embodied the terror of what I might have been or what might have happened to me if I dropped my guard. I never spoke to either of these individuals -- only observed them at a fearful distance.
Many decades ago, when I was a graduate student, there was a rumor in circulation among my peers that 50% of the students who finished their classwork and comprehensive exams never completed their dissertations. Naturally, I was afraid that I that I might fall into that ABD black hole. In those days, I haunted Widener Library's vast reading room and there it was that I encountered my first dreaded doppelganger. He was a bespectacled gloomy fellow, not unlike me, but taller, ganglier, and, I think, homelier. The story was that he had been working on his dissertation for 17 years. After I would sit I down to work in a morning, he'd wander in, choose a place, open his briefcase, spread out his books and papers on the table, sharpen his pencils and then, after a quarter of an hour, get up and walk out and come back a few minutes later with a copy of The New York Times. He'd read the paper in a leisurely manner, then put it aside and turn to his dissertation. After a while, he would check his watch and then go out for a cup of coffee. Shortly afterward, it was lunchtime; then it was time for tea, and then came the hour to pack up and go home. Did he do an hour's work during the day; not much more, maybe less.
Of course I feared that I could turn into this fellow. I suspect that it was good for me to be presented with such a scary doppelganger. His negative example forced me to keep my nose to the grindstone. Without Sir Procrastination, who knows, I might be sitting at that library table to this day, pretending to write that damn dissertation.
My second doppelganger is equally frightening but more contemporary. He's a pathetic guy who lives right here in Boulder -- somewhere nearby, because he frequently passes my window on his way to the mall, where he hits people up for spare change. He looks alarmingly like me -- same size, same shape, roughly of my age, though grayer and balder and dirtier. I could have been him if a single one of my genes on a single chromosome had failed. There I would be, living alone in a small room stacked to the gills with newspapers and magazines, living off welfare and emerging only to shout leftist slogans at passers-by. Doppelganger #2 is a crazy defective version of myself; a secret sharer who embodies my deepest fears.
I confess that I hate these two guys, not for themselves but because I know that I could have been them if I hadn't been lucky.
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