You know how it is with you only by reference to how it appears to be with others. To have your standards entirely within yourself, not to depend on what you imagine of how others see you, is something you take pride in, ignoring the fact that the pride which consolidates and stabilises this stance as well as the standards of measurement on which it is based are fragile appropriations of the view from the other. That there is a way it is with you, that there is a stance you can take up, can work to retain or to discard, is to be in a kind of dynamic flow, to be in time, and in the times, in the worlding of the world. Nobody ever gets free of this, it is what must be given to be somebody (but given to whom?) in order to gain access to all the opportunities of this state, including the opportunity to strive to get free of it... or even just to grumble about it. To be a state is to have a politics, some kind of perforce democracy of subpersonalities; the machinery of state, a ministry of the interior and one of the exterior, foreign affairs which turn out to be so interwoven with internal affairs that no line can be drawn between them. All of this because there is something you want, something you can't and won't cede, and the world to you becomes the demand that you do so, the mirror image of your desire. And whether you win a round or lose one the desire only comes to seem more real, indisputably real, until the very moment that it disappears into thin air.