'...Few writers have cut through themselves, their assumptions, their romances, so unsentimentally as the intermittently reclusive Frenchman, who notes in the same book that “We ought at least, for prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people’s views are never in accordance with our own.” And after pages and pages on what he so Buddhistically calls “the variability of the self” and on the tenacity with which we cling to an image of someone even as that person is constantly changing, he simply concludes, “What one knows does not belong to oneself,” as if placing the entire frame of his project in a building without a roof.'
