"Cette sphère transcendentale est une sphère d’existence absolue, c’est-à-dire de spontanéités pures, qui ne sont jamais objets et qui se déterminent elles-mêmes à exister. Le Moi étant objet, il est évident que je ne pourrai jamais dire: ma conscience, c’est-à-dire la conscience de mon Moi (sauf dans un sens purement désignatif comme on dit par example: le jour de mon baptême). L’Ego n’est pas propriétaire de la conscience, il en est l’objet."
— J-P. Sartre, La transcendance de l'ego.

‘But it’s not a question of sight, it’s a question of touch.’
And he remembered—sentiments-centimètres—that French pun about love, so appallingly cynical, so humiliatingly true. ‘But only humiliating,’ he assured himself, ‘because we choose to think it so, arbitrarily, only cynical because Beatrice in suso e io in lei guardava; only appalling because we’re creatures who sometimes vomit bile and because, even without vomiting, we sometimes feel ourselves naturally Christians.’ But in any case, nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse. Meanwhile, however . . . He tilted another gill of water down his throat. And when he was well enough to work, wouldn’t he also be well enough to thirst again for that other god-like kingdom, with its different ecstasies, its other peace beyond all understanding? But tant mieux, tant mieux, so long as the Bears remained unmoved and the Muses went on pointing.
— Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks

"Hidden away under the symbol of their corporeality, both in him and in her, doubtless lurked something which was themselves. But that self was hard to get at; obscured by the too familiar trappings of voice, name, appearance, occupation, circumstance, even the fleeting perception of self became blunted or confused. And there were many selves. She could never be the same self with him as when she was alone; and even that solitary self which she pursued, shifted, changed, melted away as she approached it, she could never drive it into a dark corner, and there, like a robber in the night, hold it by the throat against the wall, the hard core of self chased into a blind alley of refuge. The very words which clothed her thoughts were but another falsification; no word could stand alone, like a column of stone or the trunk of a tree, but must riot instantly into a tropical tangle of associations; the fact, it seemed, was as elusive and as luxuriant as the self. Only in a wordless trance did any true apprehension become possible, a wordless trance of sheer feeling, an extra-physical state, in which nothing but the tingling of the finger-tips recalled the existence of the body, and a series of images floated across the mind, un-named, unrelated to language. That state, she supposed, was the state in which she approached most closely to the self concealed within her,...."
 — Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent.

She reaches up to a cupboard for the tin of ground coffee and the filter papers, runs the cold-water tap, fills a jug, fetches a spoon. Most of the cups are clean. She sets out two. There’s pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she’s no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won’t remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal’s thong between her toes, the summer’s warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.
— Ian McEwan, Nutshell.

The dogs still bark,
and something is not clear.
From ignorance dogs barked always.

How to enlighten them?
There are no dogs now -
They do but bark.

What it not clear is what is clear.
Dogs have the scent,
Yet nothing runs like prey.

Shall we seem to disappear
Until the dogs stop barking?
There is no other way to explain.

— Laura Riding, "Cure of Ignorance".

From a phenomenologist’s perspective, then, pre-reflective self-consciousness is not a static self-identity but a dynamic process – a process sometimes described as a ‘self-differentiation’, a pre-reflective ‘mineness’ or even pre-reflective ‘self-affection’. The inner dynamics of protention and retention, which are unnoticeable as such, form what might be called a ‘phenomenal background’. Husserl himself refers to this structuring also as ‘(primal) association’, as an interlacing of subject and object preceding their separation and opposition. And it is worthwhile to emphasize once more that this associative fusion in retention and protention is not identical to the experience of the world as expressed in objective judgments but that it is related to a lived, naive, and speechless experience of the world.
- Norman Sieroka, Leibniz, Husserl and the Brain.

À minuit, je sucre des fraises
J'ai la feuille de vigne embrasée
Je me lève, je pèse mon pèze
Rue Saint Denis, y a bon baiser

Pas besoin d'être une sorcière
Pour avoir un manche à balai
J'en ai un qui me dit : " Poussière !
Tu iras où je veux aller "

Il me nargue, il me tarabuste,
M'enfournant dans ses réacteurs
Ce relatif petit arbuste
S'enracine au fond de mon cœur

Que désigne-t-il cet index
Pointé toujours vers l'azimut
Comme si le ciel avait un sexe
Comme si Dieu même était en rut ?

Alors à minuit, moi je mange
De la femme avec mon bec tendu
Oui, j'en mange comme on se venge
D'être un ange trop mal foutu

D'avoir là, sous cette ceinture,
Ah non ! ça n'est pas élégant !
D'avoir là, qui dure, qui dure,
Ce doigt borgne obsédé de gant

...

- Claude Nougaro - "Rue St Denis"