It won’t do to say that my head is really here, though hidden from me. Only I myself am perfectly placed to observe what’s here, and if it’s hidden from me it’s truly absent. The situation is not that I can’t see what’s here, but that only I can, and that I see Nothing. As if anyone there could talk me out of what I find here, or is in any position to try!

Nor will it do to say I can feel my head with my fingertips. I can’t. I see that what I’m fingering is a phantom so empty and transparent and colourless that it could scarcely be less like a head. A man can have a glass eye, but hardly a glass head! The other senses don’t help either: in fact, they disclose everything but the missing head. Just as I see outer objects and not eyes, so I hear sounds, not ears; taste food, not a tongue; smell odours, not a nose. If I go by my senses here and now, I have only one ‘sense organ’—this remarkable Void, this ‘hole where a head should have been’.

Who is it that needs no head, in order to live and see the world?