Yes! While I was reading it, I noted down two passages which struck me as central. The first is just after he has sent the shuttle off:

I felt I was justified in thinking that I had defeated the 'simulacra', and that behind the illusion, contrary to all expectation, I had found the real Rheya again -- the Rheya of my memories, whom the hypothesis of madness would have destroyed.

and

We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world.

Both, for some reason, and bear with me, reminded me of Derrida's theory on friendship and death -- how all who we love are in a way already dead to us. It sounds depressing, but it isn't really. What he says is that what we love are not the completely other that is the other person -- that is inaccessible to us -- but our image of that person. The reason it becomes less depressing is that that bit never really dies. I digress. I am not sure why my brain connected these three things (they fit together -- usually that is a sign no one else knows what I am on about), but I thought I'd put it out there.



Yes.



Can one take one's own life without being self-conscious? I am sure I have come across someone who argued that that was the main proof of self-awareness. It wasn't Nietzsche, I think, but it was someone he reminds me of.



Um, yes. Intersped.

I was also at one point thinking about Rheya (or Harey) as a mirror for Kelvin. I don't remember where the thought took me, but I remember thinking it because I connected it to a reading of Balzac's "The Girl with the Golden Eyes" or some such. It was fairly early on, but I think my idea was that the ocean might be using the particular images to provide an image. I suspected Sartorious of being a pedofile at the time (still do, a little), and I thought the ocean might be using the child as a way of conveying an objection to the poking and prodding. That came out wrong. Hmmm. I think I rejected the idea further on, though. But I cannot remember why.


I was also struck quite powerfully by the idea of Solaris as an image of the author, and of Solarists as a particular breed of literary critics and theorists. It fits quite wonderfully.