A Leopard-Skin Hat

Each book would enable him to rectify something in himself. Not that he looked to books for advice or examples to follow, any more than he found them there: no, what helped him was other people’s thoughts and reflections, from which he would concoct his own form of honey, blending this or that insight with his personal intuitions, discarding one, embracing another, borrowing a detail from yet another.

“I” was actually made up of all kinds of words and voices, all kinds of thoughts and views, that were not the fruit of Fanny’s own personal reflections but a mishmash, so to speak, and sometimes even a substitute for her own.

Much of the time Fanny’s body was lost in thought, like the rest of her being.

She was the living example of what a Narrator has to confront every hour of every day. She was a book from before the book.

The idea we form of others comes solely from their relationship with ourselves.