He often felt as if he were growing out of a stage of life, so that values long accepted were suddenly seen as having been uprooted - this had been going on for a long time, but he'd only just noticed - and now the mooring points, the actions by which those values functioned to stabilise things, were themselves floating free in an indefinite space. He could seize hold of them but instead of the comforting feeling of groundedness which they produced in the past there was the sensation that he'd merely imparted his own momentum to them, something they'd actually been waiting for. Some of this was certainly real, as desires lost their urgency they also shed some of the latent metaphysics that sustained them, but it was also symptomatic of the nature of the search for stable ideas. Every idea, especially those ideas called feelings, was always shadowed by its opposite, so that any position had in it something of a negotiation. Oddly the losing side in these negotiations retained the power to bring about feelings of guilt, as if there were something shameful in any reconciliation with the world, and a secret witness to crystalise that shame.