It was a singular and disturbing effect that was produced in him by reading himself as if he were a stranger, as if his writing had been written by someone else. This effect of the duplication of his personality reminded him of a former experience of self-duplication which he never recalled without a shudder. Once when gazing at the reflection of his own gaze in a mirror he had the sensation of seeing himself as someone else; he regarded himself as an unsubstantial shadow, as an impalpable phantom, and this alarmed him to such a degree that he called to himself softly by his own name. And his voice sounded to him as if it were the voice of another, a voice which came forth out of space, out of the invisible, out of impenetrable mystery. He cleared his throat, touched himself, felt the quickened beating of his heart. He had never forgotten that unforgettable experience. His present feeling was not the same, but it had something that resembled it. Had he written that? Was he the same person as the man who had written that? Did he contain within himself more than one person? Might it not be that he carried within him a whole legion of souls sleeping one below another? Were not all his ancestors sleeping somewhere in the limbo of his brain? Did others see him as he saw himself, or did they see him quite differently, and was he always actually doing and saying that which he thought he was? This last idea, an absurd and extravagant idea, had obsessed him for some time past and it caused him anguish, for he said to himself: This is madness, this is sheer madness. Only too often, in fact, as he walked quietly along the street, it had occurred to him to think something like this: “What if, instead of walking quietly and soberly, I were really pirouetting or making ridiculous contortions or behaving improperly? This hostility which I have remarked in certain of my acquaintance, may it not have arisen because I have said things to them which I am unaware of having said, or because when I thought I was offering them my hand I was in fact making some impudent or contemptuous gesture? When I imagine myself to be saying one thing, may it not be they hear something very different or perhaps contrary?” This absurd obsession disquieted him, irritated him, made him doubt the sanity and vigour of his reason, and he had to exercise all the power of autosuggestion at his command to overcome it. With a vigorous effort he threw off this obstinate vagary of his mind, but only to return to the question of the strangeness of what he had written.