One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

we are ready enough to note the faults of others, while all the time unconscious of our own.

The thought, rather, remained firmly planted, that I was not for others what up to then I had inwardly pictured myself as being.

This was the way in which I wanted to be alone. Without myself. I mean to say, without that self which I already knew, or which I thought I knew.

If I was not for others what up to then I had believed myself to be to myself, what was I?

From that time on, I had one despairing obsession : to go in pursuit of that stranger who was in me and who kept fleeing me; whom I could not halt in front of a mirror, without his at once becoming the me that I knew; the one who lived for others and whom I could not know; whom others beheld living and not I. I wanted to see and know him, too, as others saw and knew him.