Every text of the Elephant, every article and every comment on politics, society, history, and culture, constituted a small but bold overturning, a refutation of the self-evident and the commonly accepted for the sake of a new, unrefined, and therefore liberating thought, because "the self-evident is not exactly how its appearance presents it."

It was as if he were saying (he often did say) that there is another way to see things, for the simplest reason that since they were made by people, people can, if they wish, change them. That’s why most of his writings are still fresh, as if they were just cut from their timeliness; they preserve and convey to us the freshness of the unformed, of the real in its genesis: it could have been different.