“I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance.”

— Claude Lévi-Strauss

Introduction
Myth and Meaning (1978)

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Claude Lévi-Strauss 35

French anthropologist and ethnologist 1908–2009

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Context: This book is a ripped, by no mean reliable map of some of the landscapes that make up a particular phase of my life. It’s about places where things happened or didn’t happen, places where I stayed and things that have stayed with me, places I’d wanted to see or places I passed through or just ended up. In a way they’re all the same place—the same landscape—because the person these things happened to was the same person who in turn is the sum of all things that happened or didn’t happen in these and other places. Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by that same token, all the things that didn’t happen didn’t happen there too. (p. 1).