The primary person and the secondary person were two identities through which he lived. They were entirely different and could not appear simultaneously, their worlds were incompatible. The former was essentially alone, undergoing the experiment of life as both subject and experimenter, while the latter lived in a world that had already been colonised by others, seemingly primary or secondary in their own right. The primary could establish meanings, could reference experience in a stable way and hence had no need of irony, unless as an observed feature of the world, but for this very reason had no defences. The secondary, being all too aware of the instability and proliferation of meanings lived in a world entirely pervaded by irony, for this being there was only oblique relationship and many escape routes, but with an intolerable gap between the stated and the real intention. This was an internalised version of the distinction between naive and sentimental poets, with both existing in the same subject in a troubled co-dependence.