He was struck by certain things, by how much the same..., by how different..., by how he'd misunderstood..., by how his understanding of that other had subtly shifted..., by how he always, or never... It was the striking rather than the thing that struck, and which took place in an eternal fringe zone, a recurrent place that was not a place, in a time that was not a time. It was a movement towards a distant satisfaction, but by the same token was far from satisfying. Of this alert unnerving sharpness, this unbalance that was oddly stabilised, like certain mannerist paintings,  where the added factor that brings them back to alignment with themselves is not in the picture but in the viewer, of this, he wondered whether it was after all the true taste of life, of those moments when the subject fleetingly catches his own eye in a mirror.