I imagine my Hamlet differently. Forgive me, but you are wan and faded. That’s not what I want.

ROLE (phlegmatically): Nevertheless, you will play me exactly as I am.

STERN (taking painful stock of his double): But don’t you understand? I don’t want to be like you.

ROLE: Perhaps I don’t want—to be like you. Indeed, I am only being polite: when called, I come. On my way here, I wondered: why?

Rar’s fingers patted the air, as though an acting cue were whirling about unseen; they clutched at something then suddenly let go; Rar watched the word flutter away.

“Now this is where, dear conceivers, I will try to close the recorder’s first vent. Stern needs to bang into that why. As an actor, a professional speaker of other people’s words, he may not be able to find his own words to explain himself—his reflected self—to his reflection.

“I think this is all fairly simple: every three-dimensional being doubles himself twice—reflecting himself outwardly and inwardly. Both reflections are untrue: the cold, flat likeness returned by the looking glass is untrue because it is less than three-dimensional; the face’s other reflection, cast inward, flowing along nerves to the brain and composed of a complex set of sensations, is also untrue because it is more than three-dimensional.

“Poor Stern wants to objectify that inner likeness of himself, to raise it from the bottom of his soul, to lure it out with his acting and press it on the role; but the other reflection responds to his call—the dead, glassy one hidden under surfaces and reflected outwardly. He doesn’t want it; he rejects the presumptuous phantom, and so creates for it an objective existence outside itself. This also happens outside plays; it has before and will again. Take, for instance, Ernesto Rossi* : in his memoirs he describes a visit to the ruins of Elsinore. Roughly thus: at some distance from the castle Rossi stopped the carriage and proceeded on foot. In the deepening dusk he walked on with steady step. The eternal story of the Danish prince now took hold of him. Striding toward the black silhouette of the bridge, he began reciting (at first to himself, then more and more loudly) Hamlet’s appeal to his father’s ghost. And when, gradually drawn into the familiar role, he reached the Ghost’s cue and raised his head in the familiar way, he saw it: the Ghost emerging from the gates and gliding noiselessly toward the bridge across the moat: right on cue. Rossi tells us only that he hared back to the carriage, found the coachman, and ordered him to drive the horses with all his might. So the actor fled—in this case from the role come to him. But he might have stayed put, by the bridge leading from one world to the other. Indeed Stern will have to stay put—this takes no talent: will is enough. But let’s go back to the play. Our character has been waiting for us: I have made his pause too long. So then …”

STERN: You mean people will see me like that? Like you?

ROLE: Yes.

STERN (abstracted): Now. Another question: where are you from? Actually: no matter where you’re from, you’ll have to go. I’m refusing the role.

ROLE (rising): As you like.

STERN (makes to follow after): Stop. I’m afraid someone will see you. I wouldn’t want anyone but me— You understand.

ROLE: Don’t be too quick to include me in space. Seeing me is, so to speak, a matter of choice. We exist, but provisionally. Whoever wants to see me will, whoever doesn’t … Indeed, it is a violence and in bad taste to be forcibly real.