There are two entirely different dimensions of the self, each infinite in its own way, the synchronic and the diachronic. The former is the present moment, often taken to be the pivotal reality of experience, the glowing ember, the now, the only place in which all feeling, will and knowing can be realised. But when you look closely at it you find nothing there but a flow of fleeting and insignificant images and sensations, posed against an impenetrable background, a wall of fog, a perennial irony. It appears to be the most banal simplicity and yet if you try to render any of it explicit you find that the commentary is endless. It is pure particularity and so escapes your analytic gaze which only knows how to render up generalities. Every purely particular moment contains an effectively infinite quantity of latent generalities. To dig these out requires work and a measure of genius such as you rarely possess: you need to smash generalities against each other, split them to yield the wild flashing essences, instantly recognised and consumed. The latter dimension, that of the life history, of the narratives traversed and re-traversed by purpose and desire, by the striving to be, to integrate and individuate. It extends into an unknown futurity in which you somehow hope to find yourself. All of this, with its dependence on duration and memory and on the mechanisms of mind and world, seems unreal and flimsy in relation to the self-certainty of immediacy, but it is full, or prospectively full, while the latter is empty. What you barely realise is how interdependent these two are, that there can be no choice between them. One is like poetry and the other like documentary, the tension between them is almost hostile. Your inveterate loyalty is to the former, which is why the latter so often seems chaotic and shallow, even as you keep plunging back into it, insatiably.