I was put into bed then, in my room, and examined by the doctor and his assistant. The doctor was whistling, and I closed my eyes. My body had already become just an object to be worked on. I imagined my new body being taken from its rack and prepared in another room.

After a while, the doctor said, “We’re ready to go ahead now. You made a good choice. Your new facility has almost been picked out a few times now. He’s been waiting a while for his outing. I’m glad his day has finally come.”

Insofar as it was possible, I had got used to the idea that I might die under the anesthetic, that these might be my last moments on earth. The faces of my children as babies floated before me as I went under. This time, though, I was afraid in a new way: not only of death, but of what might come out of it—new life. How would I feel? Who would I be?

3

A THEORY-LOVING friend of mine has an idea that the notion of the self, of the separate, self-conscious individual, and of any autobiography which that self might tell or write, developed around the same time as the invention of the mirror, first made en masse in Venice in the early sixteenth century. When people could consider their own faces, expressions of emotion and bodies for a sustained period, they could wonder who they were and how they were different from and similar to others.

My children, around the age of two, became fascinated by their own images in the looking glass. Later, I can remember my son, aged six, clambering onto a chair and then onto the dining table in order to see himself in the mirror over the fireplace, kissing his fingers and saying, as he adjusted his top hat, “Masterpiece! What a lucky man you are, to have such a good-looking son!” Later, of course, they and their mirrors were inseparable. As I said to them: Make the most of it, there’ll be a time when you won’t be able to look at yourself without flinching.

According to my friend, if a creature can’t see himself, he can’t mature. He can’t see where he ends and others begin. This process can be aided by hanging a mirror in an animal’s cage.