Lacking Authorization

Every life is inexplicable… No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling…  We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we can understand ourselves.  This is a deception.  We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence.  No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

~ Paul Auster, The Locked Room