Marc Lehwald, The Mirror Project, Keukenhof, the Netherlands, 2014, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
My very first memory takes place at the local Blockbuster store, where I went one night with my father to rent a movie. I was four or five years old. He let me run ahead of him through the aisles, and I remember a rare, if not completely novel, feeling of independence. Turning a corner, I saw a man wearing glasses and light-wash jeans, with a brown beard and brown hair, standing with his back toward me, facing the shelves. He looked exactly like my father. I hugged him around his legs. When the man turned around, I realized that he was not my father but rather another man, a stranger, whom I had mistaken for my father. And the stranger seemed displeased with my affection. I exploded into tears. This is not only my first memory but also my first experience of terror.
Lately, I have been having nightmares in which my ex-girlfriend J.—whom I was with, off and on, for more than ten years—treats me like a stranger. These dreams are so disturbing that I wake up from them in the middle of the night. I write them in my journal as soon as possible:
Dreamed I contacted J. and went to her house, which was not her house. She was clearly preoccupied. I asked if she wanted me there. She said she didn’t care. I left.
Dreamed I met J. at a coffee shop with communal seating. I asked for a kiss and she said, “I’m not gonna do that.” Turned out she had a new job. Couldn’t believe I didn’t know about the change.
Dreamed J. came to my building, my floor. I couldn’t see her, because of blinding sunlight from behind. She did not look back at me as she walked away.
***
Meanwhile, in August 2024, my favorite tennis player, the twenty-one-year-old phenom Carlos Alcaraz, played what seemed to be, on paper at least, a routine U.S. Open second-round match against the seventy-fourth-ranked Dutch journeyman Botic van de Zandschulp.
Not only is Alcaraz my favorite tennis player, he is, in my opinion, among the greatest artists currently working in any medium. He is an instinctive genius, his game a scintillating blend of ferocious power and silken touch. From the baseline, he can trade massive ground strokes with the heaviest hitters on tour, until suddenly he perceives even the slightest opening, which may or may not even exist. Then, with a primal scream, he unleashes his devastating forehand in triple-digit miles per hour, quick as the hardest-throwing ace pitcher’s fastball, leaving his opponent stumbling in the lurch. Due to the threat of this forehand, Alcaraz’s opponents tend to retreat at the mere windup of his racket, expecting peak firepower, at which point Alcaraz alters his grip subtly, almost imperceptibly, at the very moment when he is about to strike the ball. The result, a sumptuous drop shot, sends his adversaries straining futilely to scamper forward in an attempt to reach the ball before the double bounce. Alcaraz can play every shot possible, and he can play any shot at any time. Aside from his technical mastery, his most extraordinary gift is his imagination, which engenders patterns and sequences almost never before witnessed in the sport.
On this particular night, though, Alcaraz was unrecognizable. He missed routine shots by wide margins, shanked the ball off his racket frame, and, most startlingly, let van de Zandschulp, the far less dominant player, dictate play. Alcaraz looked to be in a daze, as though he himself could not believe what was happening. Once in a while, he would do something Alcaraz-like—for example, he’d construct the perfect point by moving his opponent from side to side before hitting a wickedly angled winner—and then react in an Alcaraz-like way—pumping his fist, yelling “Vamos!” and putting his finger to his ear, signaling to the crowd to let him hear it. But these moments were few and far between.
The television commentators, like all those watching, kept expecting Alcaraz to return to his usual self. Even van de Zandschulp himself seemed not to believe that he would triumph. He showed little affect throughout the contest. “Actually,” he said on the court after winning the match, “I am a little bit lost for words.”
For days, I could not stop thinking about Alcaraz’s performance. Memories of it troubled me to such an extent that they kept infiltrating my meditation, when my intention was to concentrate on koans.
“Who are you standing here in front of me?” Emperor Wu of Liang asked the first Zen ancestor, Bodhidharma, as one koan, in part, goes.
Bodhidharma replied: “I do not know.”
***
Sometimes, when I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I think: I am just a giant monkey. But, no, that is not right—even they would not accept me in their ranks.
The ability to recognize ourselves and others has been crucial for our survival as a species. Over millions of years, the human brain has evolved a special area to recognize faces, as distinct from other objects. Studies have shown that this area, known as the fusiform gyrus, is one of many brain regions that are dedicated to other specific, essential tasks, such as the detection of written words, the perception of vocal songs, and the understanding of language. According to researchers, newborns prefer to look at familiar faces. At two and a half months, babies can respond to smiling faces by smiling back; by six months, they can distinguish familiar faces from the faces of strangers. Yet, despite having normal vision and neither brain damage nor cognitive defects, some people suffer from a disorder called prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness.
In his 2010 New Yorker essay “Face-Blind,” the neurologist and bestselling author Oliver Sacks describes his experience of the disorder, as well as the experience of others like him. A severe prosopagnosic, Sacks explains, may be unable to recognize her spouse or child. “I have walked past my husband, while staring directly at his face, on several occasions without recognizing him,” a woman writes to Sacks. Sometimes, prosopagnosics cannot recognize themselves. “On several occasions,” Sacks writes, “I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror.” Prosopagnosics learn to recognize faces by studying their most unusual features, such as protruding ears or an oversize nose. In fact, it was easier for Sacks to recognize a caricature than a photograph. I wonder whom prosopagnosics dream of.
On the other hand, some people are genetically predisposed to recognize faces. These “super recognizers,” who make up 1 to 2 percent of the population, can remember 80 percent of the faces they see, whereas the general population can remember 20 percent. British police forces have recruited these individuals, who can glimpse a pixelated face in a low-resolution image and identify someone they came across years earlier. In one year alone, according to the Guardian, the so-called super recognizers unit helped solve more than twenty-five hundred crimes. One super recognizer identified a wanted man by his eyes, revealed only through a slit between a hat and a bandanna. In 2018, from tens of thousands of hours of CCTV footage, super recognizers were able to identify the two Russian men who poisoned former double agent Sergei Skripal. In some circumstances, super recognizers can match faces better than computer systems.
***
Like it or not, it has become easier than ever for all of us to be recognized. Most of us have long become accustomed to the software that allows users to log into devices by pointing the screen at their face, in lieu of entering a password. Facial-recognition technology software can, through a complex process of mapping and analysis, verify the identity of a face in a photograph or video. The technology has proved to be useful, experts have pointed out, in diagnosing certain diseases and in designing targeted advertising. The average human being can recognize thousands of faces; in certain circumstances, artificial intelligence can now recognize more faces than we can, with similar efficiency.
Facial-recognition technology is controversial, as one might expect. In 2018, the Chinese tech giant Huawei and the artificial-intelligence company Megvii confidentially developed technology called Face++ that set off alarms whenever it detected members of the Uighur minority. At checkpoints in the Xinjiang autonomous region, the Chinese government has employed facial-recognition cameras to monitor Uighurs and detain them in reeducation camps. Since then, governments from Uganda to Myanmar have purchased and installed Chinese surveillance equipment with the similar aim of controlling and oppressing their citizens. Over several years, an American company called Clearview AI has scraped billions of photos from social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Venmo, and now claims to have a database of more than fifty billion images. The company’s motto—a rather dystopic one—is “Building a secure world, one face at a time.”
Initially, Clearview AI began selling its database, surreptitiously, to law enforcement departments and corporations. Last year, a Massachusetts senator accused Clearview AI of violating Americans’ civil liberties and privacy and asked the company to let American citizens remove ourselves from Clearview’s database. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against Clearview AI, including by the ACLU. At first, Clearview invoked a First Amendment defense before finally settling one of the lawsuits, which resulted in certain restrictions across the United States against selling its “faceprints,” the visible characteristics of a face that are automatically analyzed and translated into a unique mathematical representation of that face. Clearview AI advertises that its facial-recognition technology saves victims of child exploitation, helps ensure the safety of Ukrainian citizens and military personnel, and distinguishes between enemy and friend.
Sometimes, when I have felt most alone, I have imagined that I recognize people everywhere I look. In the end, though, they all turn out to be strangers.
***
Recognition is essential to the formation of identity, German idealist philosophers said. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued that in order to posit itself as an individual, a consciousness must be “summoned” into awareness by other individuals, a process he called gegenseitige Anerkennung, or “mutual recognition.” Mutual recognition requires two equally free self-consciousnesses, each of which limits its free activity so the other can exercise its own. In his classic 1807 work The Phenomenology of Spirit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a contemporary of Fichte’s, proposed that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.” Two consciousnesses, then, must engage in a process of “recognizing themselves as mutually recognizing one another.” Only through mutual recognition can we be at home in the “other,” whether that be the world itself or another person.
When I met J., it was as though I already knew her, and as we lay in bed sometime later, J. described the same experience, of feeling as though she recognized me.
Sometimes the recognition of self and other is uncanny, even disturbing. In 1903, a criminal named Will West arrived at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. The record clerk was in disbelief; he could have sworn that he had already admitted the man. The clerk took West’s Bertillon measurements, based on a formula for physical features that was standard at the time. He searched his files and found one with practically identical numbers under the name William West, and the picture appeared to show the man standing before him. Will West grinned in amazement. “That’s my picture,” he said, “but I don’t know where you got it, for I have never been here before.” It turned out that William West had been admitted two years earlier to serve a life sentence in Leavenworth for murder. The two prisoners were not identical twins, or related at all. And neither knew the other one existed.
In Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique, a Polish woman and a Frenchwoman somehow, intuitively, recognize that they are doubles. “I have a strange sensation,” Weronika says. “Like I’m not alone in the world.” “All my life I’ve felt I was in two places at the same time,” Véronique says.
***
It was while J. and I once made love that I truly recognized myself for the first time. When she said my name, I realized I was that person, that he is who I am, or I am who he is. I remember, after J. had left the room, lying on the bed by myself, looking down at my naked right leg, thin and hairy, and understanding that this is my body. It had never occurred to me in such a way before. I became aware of the time and place—J.’s apartment, her bedroom—and for the first time in my life, the fact that I had found myself somewhere, here, made some innate, unspeakable sense. At the same time, despite the intimacy of the experience, I did feel, beyond a doubt, some estrangement from myself. I noted that my body is the body of a man, like the bodies of other men I had seen, my father and all my ancestors, which meant that, despite what I still thought or wished, I was no longer a child, and also that, one day, I was going to die. When J. and I met, I was twenty-five years old. I believed I could become anybody. Now I am thirty-seven, and after J. and I broke up last year, having finally ceased to recognize each other, there is no more mistaking myself for anyone else.
I live and train at a Zen Buddhist temple. During a recent ceremony, called jukai, a lay ordination, I publicly vowed to live my life according to what are called the sixteen Boddhisatva precepts, the Zen Buddhist ethical code. The precepts are not apodictic rules, like the commandments of the Bible, but rather guidelines to be worked with over time, integrated into one’s natural way of being. Here are some: “There is no separation between self and others,” reads a version of the precept called Do Not Misuse Sexuality. “Realize self and other as one,” reads a version of the precept called Do Not Elevate Yourself and Blame Others. A common slogan in precept study is “Self and Other are not two.” According to Zen Buddhism, in the absolute sense, the self, like all conditioned phenomena, is without intrinsic existence. Everything exists interdependently; because this occurs, that occurs, as the Buddha said. And, conversely, when this does not occur, that does not occur. Only when self and other are recognized as empty will enlightenment be realized. Upon hearing “The Heart Sutra,” a fundamental Mahayana Buddhist teaching that points repeatedly to emptiness, several of the Buddha’s followers are said to have suffered heart attacks and died.
There is a koan based on an old Chinese ghost story, “Senjo and Her Soul Are Separated.” Senjo falls in love with her cousin Ochu, but her father betroths her to another man. Senjo and Ochu are heartbroken. Ochu leaves the village on a small boat, and as he leaves, he sees Senjo running along the riverbank, waving to him. Senjo joins Ochu, and they travel to a far-off land, where they marry and have two children. A few years later, Senjo longs to see her father and ask for his forgiveness. She and Ochu return to the village, and Ochu tells her father the story.
“Ochu,” Senjo’s father says. “What girl are you talking about?”
“Your daughter Senjo,” replies Ochu.
“My daughter Senjo?” her father says. “Ever since you left, she’s been sick in bed, unable to speak.”
As Senjo approaches her parents’ door, the Senjo who has been sick gets up from her bed and rushes out. When the two Senjos meet, they merge into one.
“I cannot tell which was really me,” Senjo says. “The one that went away in the boat, or the one that stayed at home.”
Master Goso, as the koan goes, asks: “Senjo was separated from her soul. Which was the real Senjo?”
The beauty of the koan is that it hints at a truth beyond duality, a way of living so that there can be no separation. Perhaps we never come together; perhaps we never part.
***
During many of my waking hours, I fantasize about running into J. One night, after waking up from one of my nightmares, I opened a new document on my computer, which I titled “Ways of Running into You,” and typed up the fantasies. Some include shunning her, the way that, in my dreams, she shuns me. However, others hint at a different response, a certain recognition, either mutual or solely on my part, an acknowledgment of what we shared, which is implicit in what we lost:
I date every pretty girl I meet on the dating apps. I take each one to the burger joint in your neighborhood, and you see me every time. You get the impression that I have really moved on from you. Clearly, I have. Yet soon after you see me with them, I break up with them.
I run into your brother at a Thai restaurant. He’s still rail-thin and frazzled, even though he’s in his late thirties. How old does that make us? He offers up that you are pregnant. I tell him that I didn’t want to know that. Nonetheless, I am overjoyed. Thank you, I think. Thank you. I am so relieved.
You once told me that if the world were ending, like in Melancholia, I am the person you would want in your hut of sticks. Well, the world is ending. You have a realization. You leave your new boyfriend, the one I imagine you with. You come to me. We take the cyanide pills together, holding hands.
In our favorite bookstore, you are browsing. I come up behind you and say, “But have you ever read Calvino,” because Calvino is our favorite, because we talked about him on our first date. You turn around, beaming, and practically leap into my arms. We are so happy to see each other, we cannot contain ourselves in public. I have no idea if you have found anyone else. Neither of us has to imagine the other. We are just happy in that moment, as happy as the moment we met.
“Touch me,” writes the poet Stanley Kunitz, “remind me who I am.”
Benjamin Ehrlich is the author of The Brain in Search of Itself. His short story “The Master Mourner” was included in The Best American Short Stories 2023.
