I’ve always worried, in those occasional moments of detachment when we become conscious of ourselves as individuals who are seen as ‘others’ by other people, about the physical and even moral impression I must make on those who observe me and talk to me, whether on a daily basis or in a chance meeting.

We’re all used to thinking of ourselves as primarily mental realities, and of other people as immediately physical realities. We vaguely see ourselves as physical people, in so far as we consider how we look to others. And we vaguely see others as mental realities, though only when we’re in love or in conflict does it really dawn on us that they, like we, are predominantly soul.

And so sometimes I lose myself in futile speculations about the sort of person I am in the eyes of others: how my voice sounds, what kind of impression I leave in their involuntary memory, how my gestures, my words and my visible life are inscribed on the retinas of their interpretation. I’ve never succeeded in seeing myself from the outside. No mirror can show us ourself from outside, because no mirror can take us out of ourself. We would need a different soul, a different way of looking and thinking. If I were an actor projected on a screen, or if I recorded my voice on records, I’m certain that I still wouldn’t know what I am on the outside, because like it or not, and no matter what I might record of myself, I’m always here inside, enclosed by high walls, on the private estate of my consciousness of me.

I don’t know if others are like me, or if the science of life consists essentially in being so alienated from oneself that this alienation becomes second nature, such that one can participate in life as an exile from his own consciousness. Or perhaps other people, even more self-absorbed than I, are completely given over to the brutishness of being only themselves, living outwardly by the same miracle that enables bees to form societies more highly organized than any nation and allows ants to communicate with a language of tiny antennae whose results surpass our complex system of mutual understanding.

The geography of our consciousness of reality is an endless complexity of irregular coasts, low and high mountains, and myriad lakes. And if I ponder too much, I see it all as a kind of map, like that of the Pays du Tendre* or of Gulliver’s Travels, a fantasy of exactitude inscribed in an ironic or fanciful book for the amusement of superior beings, who know where countries are really countries.

Everything is complex for those who think, and no doubt thought itself takes delight in making things yet more complex. But those who think need to justify their abdication with a vast programme of understanding, which they set forth – like liars their explanations – with heaps of exaggerated detail that eventually reveal, once the earth is swept away, the lying root. Everything is complex, or I’m the one who’s complex. But at any rate it doesn’t matter, because at any rate nothing matters. All of this, all these considerations that have strayed off the broad highway, vegetate in the gardens of excluded gods like climbing plants detached from their walls. And on this night as I conclude these inconclusive considerations, I smile at the vital irony which makes them appear in a human soul that was already, even before there were stars, an orphan of Fate’s grand purposes.