And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That’s where I am alone, the observer and the observed.
I descend, I try to tell the truth, but the primitive diving bell that I call my consciousness is a more fallible instrument than the cheap thermometer in my fish tank. I may not have a very bottom. I may be much shallower than I like to think, or I may be a creature of infinity, for now confined. My real world, as I fondly call it, may be the necessary cable that holds me in waters I can manage.
Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies (1996)
