From Shailesh Mark's reflection: "The title of Auden's The Double Man is taken from a quotation which he found in Charles Williams’ book The Descent of the Dove. Williams was the first man Auden said that he felt himself in the presence of the supernatural, of holiness, when he first met him. The quotation Auden found in Williams is from The Life of Antony by St. Athanasius of Alexandria: ‘A certain brother said, It is right for a man to take up the burden for them who are near to him and, so to speak, to put his own soul in the place of that of his neighbor, and to become, if it were possible, a double man. He must suffer, and weep, and moan with him as if he had put on the actual body of his neighbor. And he must suffer for him as he would for himself.’ This is deeply embedded in Auden’s Double Man and flows into his Age of Anxiety."