There were scarcely any of those little, what you might call personal touches to...

There were scarcely any of those little, what you might call personal touches to his personality, as if his habit of suspending belief extended even unto his own being. I say he had a propensity for 'finding himself in the right place at the right time'; yet it was almost as if he himself were an objet trouve, for subjectively, himself he never found, since it was not his self which he sought.
He would have called himself a 'man of action'. He subjected his life to a series of cataclysmic shocks because he loved to hear his bones rattle. That was how he knew he was alive.