His awkwardness could never be expunged. If it went into abeyance for a time then that became the event, but its possibility, derived from an axiomatic separation, remained central. The actuality was easily and inevitably rekindled from the slightest jar. The things he valued most were always conceived during intermittences when the outside had become merely formal and devoid of a determinative gaze, but to be carried through they needed to cross over into the world. Realization required the breaking of the barrier of solitude and was therefore always doomed to failure. Such failure, however bitter or disappointing, was always a liberation, since it returned him to himself and to the matter itself, unsullied, as it had been at the start.