“When we were about to move in, I realised that I didn’t feel the least attachment to anything in my apartment. I could have felt a certain joy, something like intoxication, at this freedom; on the contrary, I felt slightly scared. I had managed, it seemed, to live for forty years without forming the most tenuous of attachments to a single object. All told, I had two suits which I wore alternately. Books, sure, I had books; but I could easily have bought them again, not one of them was in any way precious or rare. Several women had crossed my path; I didn’t have a photograph or a letter from any of them. Nor did I have any photos of myself: I had no memory of what I might have been like when I was fifteen, or twenty or thirty. I didn’t really have any personal papers: my identity could be contained in a couple of files which would easily fit into a standard-size cardboard folder. It is wrong to pretend that human beings are unique, that they carry within them an irreplaceable individuality; as far as I was concerned, at any rate, I could not distinguish any trace of such an individuality. As often as not it is futile to wear yourself out trying to distinguish individual destinies and personalities. When all’s said and done, the idea of the uniqueness of the individual is nothing more than pompous absurdity. We remember our own lives, Schopenhauer wrote somewhere, a little better than a novel we once read. That’s about right: a little, no more.”
– Platform, Michel Houellebecq