in fact , he had no concrete reason to search , except that he knew something was in there , deep in the recesses that sought to be probed and dissected and reduced to smaller and smaller pieces : sliced and bisected and further stripped of its superfluities and , thus , shredded down to its rudimentary components , which would thereupon be eviscerated until one was as close to the boundaries that separated reason from its absence as one could possibly be .