Existence seems to me to be too blurred, too worked up in the past and the future, for 'real' self-knowledge:

Lillian Hellman...named a volume of her memoirs pentimento. She explained that pentimento, the image of earlier underlying paintings that emerge on a reused canvas, was an apt metaphor for her understanding of her autobiographical experience. She could not see even her own past directly but imagined it filtered through her present.
--- from A Vindication of Political Virtue by Virginia Sapiro

Existence as