sentences:  Only with hindsight did he realize the congruence and the logic behind them, as if all his previous studies had been driven by the same desire to make fully understandable what at first sight appeared obscure or confusing.In doing so, he relied on the readily observable background of common human experience, as he recounts in a reflection on his intellectual pursuits published in 2013, Cheminement d’un sinologue ("A Sinologist's Journey").Billeter has always been particularly fond of the German thinker Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1746-1799).