Suddenly,as if a surgical magician had operated on me for an old blindness with quick, grand results, I raise my head from my anonymous life to clear knowledge of how I exist. And I see that everything I've done, everything I've thought, everything I've been is a kind of trick or madness. I'm surprised at how much I managed not to see. I miss everything I was, all that I see, finally, I am not.
I stare, as if in a wide-open space in the sun that breaks through clouds, at my past life; and I note with a metaphysical shock how all my most solid gestures, my clearest ideas, and my most logical purposes were not, in the last analysis, mere drunkenness, natural madness, grand unknowing. I didn't even play-act. I was play-acted. I wasn't the actor but his gestures.

Everything I've done, thought, been, is a summa of subordinations, either to a false being I thought mine, since I outwardly played his part, or of a weight of circumstances I thought to be the air I was breathing. I am, in this moment of seeing, a sudden solitary, who recognizes himself exiled where he always found himself a citizen. In the most intimate of my thoughts I was not myself.
A sarcastic terror of life attacked me then, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious individuality. I know I was an error and a detour, that I never lived, that I only existed because I filled time with consciousness and thought...

It was a moment, and it passed. I already see the furniture around me, the old designs on the wallpaper, the sun through the dirty windows. I saw the truth for a moment. I existed for a moment with awareness, what great men are all their lives. I recall their acts and words, and I don't know if they weren't also tempted successfully by the Demon of Reality. Not knowing about oneself is living. Knowing oneself badly is thinking. Knowing about oneself suddenly, as in this glowing moment, is suddenly to have the notion of the intimate monad, the magic word of the soul. But a sudden light burns it all, consumes it all. It leaves us denuded even of ourselves.

Pessoa