The living girls and boys around the world who see these shadows take on their walk, their facial expression, their form and attitude. That is why one often comes across men and women, actual people in the street, who are not the doppelgänger of their own shadows like the actors of the cinema, but even less, namely the doppelgänger of strangers’ shadows.
It is thus a Hades, which not only sends its shadows up to the surface but also converts those who live on the surface and have not sold their shadows into doppelgänger of these shadows.
This is Hollywood.
Hell rages. There is a rush of shadow-players’ managers, shadow-dealers and shadow-brokers, shadow-arrangers (who are called directors), shadow-conjurors and shadow-renters. There are even those who sell their voices to the shadows of other people who speak a different language.
I also saw there, namely in the factories that buy shadows, about twenty people sitting in large offices, each seated before a telephone. And every two or three minutes a couple of the apparatus would buzz and the men would take the receivers in their hands and say ‘Nothing!’ And that means: no work.
For people call the shadow-factories every day wanting to sell their shadows. And because there are so many of them who want to offer their shadows, the factories had to engage twenty men to say no. And they say ‘Nothing!’ every three minutes. The whole day long.
They say nothing else.
So numerous are those in this country who thirst to sell their shadows.
And these are the owners not of ordinary shadows like yours and mine but of remarkable shadows. One man is a giant, another a hunchback, a third a dwarf, a fourth has the face of a horse or a donkey, a fifth can climb like an ape, a sixth can dance on stilts, a seventh on a rope and so on. Others are doppelgänger of famous men and can occasionally be used in historical films, and they are therefore double and triple doppelgänger. They are not only the doppelgängers of their own shadows but also of those of other shadows, which are, strange to say, also their own. Some look like Napoleon or Caesar. So they sell the shadows of their noses, which aren’t their own noses at all but those of the famous dead. If these particular noses don’t happen to be needed, then one of the twenty naysayers answers no. But if one such nose shadow does happen to be needed, then the yeasayers answer, people who sit in another office also in front of telephones. In the plazas and streets stand many statues of famous men, just as in other cities. In all the other cities of the world, however, statues have no other purpose than to bear witness to the fame of those they portray. But in this city, many of the statues have the job of proclaiming and praising various wares. For example, many famous personalities can be seen in stone and marble or copper and bronze, drinking a cup of cheap and tasty coffee or sucking on cough drops to fight hoarseness. And, whereas in this city the shadows of living men are taken together with their animation, such that the original owner becomes the shadow of his own shadow, the dead statues are supplied with the needs of living people. It may therefore truly be said that in this city, which is inhabited by nothing but shadows, only the statues are people — tasteless, it is true, but people all the same.
Just as the people are shadows and the statues are people, the plants in this city are statues. The palms of Hollywood, for example, don’t grow in the soil in which they appear to be rooted but are merely fixed in like statues. They are plants with bases instead of roots. But, whereas statues for the most part stay in the same location for a long time, this is by no means the case with the palms. For the people who rent the palms carry them first to one garden, next to another, and while their characteristic of being fixed into soil makes them similar to the statues, the fact that they change residences makes them resemble fleeting shadows. So it is that some of the most immobile things on earth, namely trees, become nearly as fleeting as the most fleeting phenomena on earth, namely shadows. Moreover, even the palms are now and then called upon to give up their shadows for the screen. And as they are capable of wandering from place to place it can be said of them, as it can also be said of men, that they are the doppelgängers of their own shadows. The natural shadow that they cast in their quality as trees becomes the doppelgängers of its shadow.
Shadows of clouds and of cloud shadows are also purchased by these factories, which use them whenever a suitable occasion arises. Sometimes men and women arrive who were able to photograph clouds from hardly accessible mountains or clouds in other dangerous locales. And these people are able to sell their cloud shadows to the factories for a designated price.
And just as lives can be turned into shadows, so can death. For in many films the shadows must die. And if it is very difficult to live according to the special laws of the shadow-world, it is much more difficult to die according to those laws. It is so difficult that a genuine death could never be harder.
For I have seen a shadow-master make the doppelgängers of a lovely shadow die nineteen times before he declared her death to be genuine and true. He required that her shadow must die not only beautifully but also in vanity. So she lay down and exposed her legs, the pretty doppelgängers of leg shadows. The shadow-master was the same one who had displayed the bathing Egyptian girls and the dead soldiers many years before, when I was a boy, arousing our lust, which is directed as much towards the horrors of death as it is towards living flesh.
The people in this city regard death in the same way they regard birth.
When a child is born, it awakes in its mother the hope that it will become a suitable, well-paid shadow.
For, in fact, it sometimes happens that an infant delivers up its tiny shadow and its voice to the screen.
In this city live many devout shadow-worshippers. As they are not content merely to worship shadows, all their thoughts and hopes are directed towards catching a glimpse of, speaking to, embracing or applauding the doppelgängers of the shadows they adore. These worshippers are unaware that the originators of the shadows are only doppelgängers. The worshippers believe that the actors are yet masters of themselves and of their shadows. And just as many lovers of books and literature have a yearning to see the authors of their favourite works in the flesh, so the shadow-worshipper also wants to see, hear and touch the supposedly living actors. However, they merely encounter the shadows of the famous and beloved shadows.
None the less, even those who are only the shadows of the celebrated and beloved shadows imagine that they are quite alive, like all other people. They are so maintained and strengthened in this conceit by the adoration of their worshippers that a doppelgängers of his beloved shadow becomes very unhappy if he is not greeted as he was the day before or if one of his colleagues is greeted more cordially than he.
This vanity and this jealousy nearly led me to believe that these shadows of shadows are somehow human.
On other occasions, however, I was persuaded that they are very different from the rest of mankind.
For example, I saw that women who were pregnant were forbidden to sell their shadows any more.
So they left the shadow-factory, without a word. This seemed to them quite natural.