In the wake of a certain kind of brief encounter, when a spark of affinity or connection seems to have been struck you find that the presence of another person in the space of your internal self-reference persists for a time like a sort of slowly dying echo. The image of the other becomes the addressee of your internal monologue in a largely pleasant version of the kind of self-consciousness that in sharper and negatively inflected contexts would be felt as shame. It elicits a stream of fresh thoughts, as if you are explaining yourself to an interested and interesting hearer. You cannot think or meditate yourself out of this condition since it affects the very root of your sense of free activity; the other is present as far down as any choice you could make, of anything you could do. After a short while the effect fades away, but this simply means that it grows so attenuated that it merges with the self-conscious white noise of your ordinary reflective state, which is seen to consist of a continuous frothing of tiny other-refracted moments of self-consciousness. This kind of white noise is what is usually mistaken for solitude. Often the other of inner self-reflection is taken to be a slightly displaced or out of phase version of yourself, and if you grow bored with your own thoughts this is because this alter-self is marked as too familiar, too predictable, unable to elicit fresh ideas. On the other hand if you imagine that the original effect also goes the other way, that the other is experiencing an image of you hovering inside her self-consciousness, this cuts no ice. You know that your own image in the mind of another is an illusion, is only a mind-born delusion, since you do not exist as a subject and cannot appear in any way at all. This makes for a curious asymmetry.