The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself--he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice.
Kevin Brockmeier, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade
clues, life, self, self-knowledge, understanding