Not Long Ago

After a tiring night journey by train, worn out, a man climbs into an omnibus just as another man climbs in from the other side. "Was steigt doch da für ein herabgekommener Schulmeister ein," he thinks: what a run-down schoolmaster that is, getting in. "Ich war es selbst, denn mir gegenüber hing ein grosser Spiegel." It was myself, for opposite me hung a large mirror. And he closes with a diagnosis: "Der Classenhabitus war mir also viel geläufiger, als mein Specialhabitus." The look of my class was far more familiar to me than my own.

The man is Ernst Mach, physicist, then a professor in Prague. The story sits in the first footnote of Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, the book he published in Jena in 1886. It is not there for light relief. The note explains why the self seems stable: "Die scheinbare Beständigkeit des Ich besteht vorzüglich nur in der Continuität, in der langsamen Aenderung," the apparent permanence of the ego lies chiefly in continuity, in slow change. Then Mach turns to himself: "Wenn ich mich heute meiner frühen Jugend erinnere, so müsste ich den Knaben (einzelne wenige Punkte abgerechnet) für einen Andern halten, wenn nicht die Kette der Erinnerungen vorläge." When I recall my early youth today, I would have to take the boy, a few features aside, for someone else, were it not for the chain of memories. "Schon manche Schrift, die ich selbst vor 20 Jahren verfasst, macht mir einen höchst fremden Eindruck." More than one piece I wrote myself twenty years ago already strikes me as utterly foreign. And then: "Man kennt sich persönlich sehr schlecht." We know ourselves very poorly.

Two proofs follow. As a young man, in the street, Mach sees in profile a face that strikes him as unpleasant, even repellent, and is more than a little startled to realise that it is his own, thrown back by two angled mirrors outside a shop that sold them. The second proof is the omnibus, and it begins with four words: "Vor nicht langer Zeit." Not long ago. Fifteen pages later, in another note, Mach wrote the sentence the book is remembered for: "Das Ich ist unrettbar." The ego cannot be saved.

The book did well. In 1900 a second, enlarged edition appeared under a new title, Die Analyse der Empfindungen. The note on the ego moved up into the main text, and the two episodes moved down into a footnote beneath it. Mach added a sentence: "Als ich diese Zeilen schrieb (1886), war mir Ribot's schönes Buch „Les maladies de la personalité" […] noch nicht bekannt." When I wrote these lines (1886), I did not yet know Ribot's fine book on the diseases of personality. For the first time in German, the page states the year it was written. A similar addition, without the year, had already appeared in the English translation of 1897, in square brackets and signed "Mach, 1895." In both cases the omnibus stays where it was: "Vor nicht langer Zeit," and the mirror "hing," hung.

In the third edition, Jena 1902, the same note reads instead: "Ich stieg einmal nach einer anstrengenden nächtlichen Eisenbahnfahrt sehr ermüdet in einen Omnibus." Once, after a tiring night journey by train, I climbed, worn out, into an omnibus. The mirror no longer hangs either: it "befand sich," it was there. The rest is unchanged, down to the run-down schoolmaster and the look of his class. The same reading appears in the fourth edition of 1903 and in the ninth, of 1922, published after Mach's death. We have not seen the editions in between.

In 1919 Freud published "Das Unheimliche," the uncanny, in the journal Imago. In a footnote he writes that Mach "berichtet zwei solcher Beobachtungen in der »Analyse der Empfindungen«, 1900, Seite 3," reports two such observations. He is citing the second edition, the last German edition in which the omnibus was still "not long ago": seventeen years after Mach had changed those words, and thirty-three after he wrote them. Then Freud tells an adventure of his own. He is alone in a sleeping-car compartment when a jolt of the train swings open the door to the adjoining washroom and in comes "ein älterer Herr im Schlafrock, die Reisemütze auf dem Kopf," an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown, a travelling cap on his head. Freud jumps up to tell him he has the wrong door, and realises, taken aback, that the intruder is his own image in the mirror on the connecting door. He remembers that he disliked the figure "gründlich," thoroughly. "Anstatt also über den Doppelgänger zu erschrecken, hatten beide — Mach wie ich — ihn einfach nicht agnosziert." So instead of being frightened by the double, both of us, Mach as well as I, had simply failed to recognise him.

In English, by contrast, the omnibus has never moved. C. M. Williams's translation of 1897, made from the first edition, reads "Not long ago." In 1914 Sydney Waterlow revised and supplemented it from the fifth German edition, that of 1906. In his translator's note he explains that for the parts of the text identical with the 1897 edition he relied largely on Williams's version, and adds that the whole translation had been read in manuscript by Mach himself. On page 4 the passage still begins: "Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night." It is this page, reprinted, that is still quoted today when philosophers discuss what it means to believe something about oneself knowing that it is oneself.

So much for the documents; from here on, this is our reading. We do not know why Mach changed those words, and it may have been a simple matter of style, like "befand sich" for "hing." But "not long ago" is a phrase that ages along with the person who writes it. It was true in 1886, when Mach was nearly fifty. It was already less true in 1900, when the page carried a date. In 1902 it becomes "once," a time that no longer ages. In the same note, "twenty years ago" stayed in every edition we have seen, but from 1900 the date in brackets holds it in place. The page about the slowly changing self changed too, slowly, at the hand of the man who wrote it.

Whoever reads Mach in English still meets the man of 1886, just off the night train. When Mach read the English translation in manuscript, before its publication in 1914, he was over seventy, and in German he had already moved that journey into an unspecified time. We do not know whether he noticed that, in another language, it was still "not long ago."