He could not shake the imagination of a state of perfect collectedness, one where no distinction remained between living and re-living, with every filiation functioning as a two-way channel, the centre everywhere. It seemed that it had once been his, and was his birthright, but had been lost so that it could now only be glimpsed in the heart of nostalgia and in the thoughtless enjoyments of others. Because he only knew it from the outside his striving to recover it entailed the effort to get outside of himself, to adopt a double perspective, a detached quasi-objectivity. This was far from impossible, but represented a civilised self-irony, verging on the comic, that was one of the ideals of the social groups with which he was identified. Finding the right listener he could spin out the misadventures of the impassioned little character that was himself and momentarily deflect its tragic desires into a serenely amused distributed intelligence of which he was, evidently, a full citizen. But where did such a listening exist? By what means was it betrayed?