Ulrich responded with animation: “When I recall my earliest years, I’m tempted to say that outside and inside were scarcely distinguishable. When I crawled toward something, it came toward me on wings; and when something happened that was important to us, it wasn’t just we who were excited by it, but the things themselves began to seethe. I wouldn’t claim that we were happier then than we were later. We weren’t in possession of ourselves yet; in fact, we didn’t really exist, our personal states were not yet distinctly separated from those of the world. It sounds strange, and yet it is true when I say that our feelings, our volitions, our very selves were not yet entirely inside ourselves. What is even stranger is that I could just as well say: were not yet entirely apart from ourselves. Because if today, when you feel you’re entirely in possession of yourself, if you ask yourself the unusual question, “Who am I really?” you will make this discovery. You will always see yourself from the outside, like a thing. You will notice that at one moment you get angry, at another sad, just as your coat will at one time be wet and at another time hot. No matter how closely you observe yourself, you will at best find unknown sides of yourself, but your inner self will remain hidden. Whatever you do, you remain outside yourself, except for those rare moments when someone would say of you that you’re beside yourself. As adults, of course, we’ve compensated by being able to think, ‘I am,’ whenever we wish, if we care to do so. You see a car, and somehow in a shadowy way you also see: ‘I see a car.’ You’re in love or you’re sad and you see that you’re sad or in love. But in a full sense neither the car nor your sadness or your love, nor you yourself, are completely there. Nothing is as completely there as it once was in childhood. Instead, everything you touch, down to your innermost self, is more or less petrified from the moment you have succeeded in being a ‘personality,’ and what is left over, enveloped in a wholly external existence, is a spectral thread of misty self-certainty and murky self-love. What has gone wrong there? One has a feeling that somewhere, something could still be reversed! Surely no one can claim that a child’s experience is totally different from a man’s! I don’t have a definitive answer to this question, even though there may be this or that idea about it. But for a long time my answer has been that I’ve lost my love for this manner of selfhood and this kind of world.”