More from Oblivio, from a piece called End of Story:

“I was simply looking at myself. I like to do this sometimes to remind myself that I’m a person in the same sense that other people are people; that when I’m with someone, that person is with me, another person, in the same way that I am with another. Of course it’s not that I ever forget this or think something different; it’s just that I need to periodically experience it again, to make it real. And that experience, each time, is like seeing a photograph of the earth from outer space and suddenly remembering that the earth is a planet in the same sense that the other planets are planets, and that each planet is orbiting the sun, which is itself one of some nearly infinite number of stars in the universe. One would never argue otherwise about these things, and yet they slip away because they have little or no significance to us, in how we live our lives.”