How strange he found it that many of the decisive fiascos that make up his life might have been saved by the utterance of a few words. This was not about an esprit d'escalier, but simply the difference between seeing a situation as closed off, where there is only one possible line of development, and seeing the same situation as open with a number of different possible lines leading out of it, and where he would permit himself not to know which one would follow. For a lover of the random he seemed highly prone to getting ahead of himself in order to divert traffic into the worst possible route. And, for one whose element was words, delighting in the varied meanings they can carry, he seemed singularly unable to come up with the verbal formulae and the attentiveness to them that would have turned around many a needlessly grim situation.