self makes itself up out of everything. A shift of inflection within a phrase, is this another self attempting to make its appearance? If the yes is mine, is no  a second me?

Self is never more than provisional (changing as it does when faced with somebody else, an ad hominem self changing when set in another language, another art), always bearing within it a new persona, a new character which the slightest accident, the slightest emotion, the slightest blow to the head will liberate to the exclusion of the previous self and which, to general astonishment, often emerges, formed instantaneously — therefore already having taken complete shape beforehand.

One is perhaps not made for a single self. One is perhaps wrong to cling to this. One takes unity for granted. (Here, as elsewhere, it is our will that impoverishes us, sacrifices us.)

In a doubled, tripled, quintupled life, one would be more at ease, less corroded, less paralyzed by the hostility of the subconscious toward the conscious (the hostility of all those other “selves” that have been dispossessed).

What wears one down the most over the course of a day or a lifetime is the effort and the tension necessary to maintain an identical self faced with the continuous temptations to alter it.

One wants too much to be someone.

--from Postface; Henri Michaux