I had always liked to tell myself that Lucie was something abstract, a legend and a myth, but now I knew that behind the poetry of the words hid an entirely unpoetic truth: that I didn‘t know her: that I
didn‘t know her as she really was, as she was in and to herself. I had been able to perceive (in my youthful egocentricity) only those aspects of her being that were turned directly to me (to my loneliness, captivity, my yearning for tenderness and affection); she had never been anything to me but a function of my own situation. (p. 250)