Experience is overlapping, nested and immediately recognised situations for the one you find yourself as. These differ in no essential way from the situations you arrive at in novels or films, distinguished only in degree and range of sensory involvment and in the type of nesting at play. What makes it the same is that whatever you are experiencing is not you, and also that what gives intent and direction to every situation is that it stakes something of what you are in an oblique but inescapable way. Life is that you don't know what you are, that you would complete yourself through experience when experience is the very thing that can never serve to do so. Every solution to the impasse of experience is conceived of as another occasion for experience. And it is not that it fails completely since it seems to take on different topological forms, flipping like a cat's cradle with more than a few variants. It is as if you are searching through all that experience can offer for the key to the whole system, the experience of the structure of experience which can't in fact be any kind of experience, but is the only possibility that answers to the noumenal mystery that you are as what has experience. If experience 'added up' in some grand way then this would be an absurd quest and you'd be better off striving for kingship, but it doesn't and instead there are these intimations of non-experience which don't pass away, which can't be dissolved in the wash and succession of situations no matter how dark or bright.