"Don't pick it up, it will bite you." But still he picked it up again and again and was bitten again and again. The elements of the trap were assembled out of whatever garbage was lying nearest at hand and it would have been a mistake to try to understand it by scrutinising these rather arbitrary, and quite ordinary, elements. Instead, what could be admired was the extraordinary cunning with which each of these traps had been put together, so that he was unable to think his way out of them. The principle was simple, deflect the efforts dedicated to getting out into tangling the victim further within; and indeed the more self-sufficient the mind took itself to be the more predictable the repertoire of moves it would make. The artifex and the victim were one and the same, but living in different times, working on different scales, producing different products.