The denseness of the moment always seemed to him a sort of millefeuille in which he was continually sliding out from under himself. The high seriousness of one layer undermined by the childishness of the next which in turn fractured to reveal the crude emotion of a third, which in turn revealed nothing more than the recurrence of wants merely believed in, and so on and on. The point was that only the obstacle embodied particularity and recognition, and yet the obstacle was necessarily entirely generic. These were the trials of a self, the quintessentially social form of its ordeals being precisely what such a self is.