My single, principal and too obviously necessary, encounter–the importance of which increases according to its persistence in time–is the one that I believe I have had with myself,  and which I will never come to grips with. The others, with their various counterparts, appear fortuitous in the successive shocks that always turn me back, with more or less violence, toward my own reality.

(Answer to an inquiry from Minotaure, 1934)