The scene of perfect transmission was a persistent dream of his, but it never corresponded to reality. He concluded that it would have required a particular singleness and absorption of consciousness, an innocence or wise naivety which had never been given to him. The perfectly contrived scene of intimacy was instead the occasion for the upwelling of a buzz of divergent thoughts. These might have seemed alienating, except that they were the augmentation rather than the disruption of the necessarily private self. Often the these thoughts were the very ones that had eluded him on an earlier occasion, like the solution to a difficult problem that had been nagging for days. But what struck him most was the exposure of the fiction on which intimacy was based, the flattening of its metaphysics, and because of the mechanical nature of the process of recall and resumption, this included intimacy with himself as well. Things arose with such pristine inconsequence, as if they could only say 'why not this?', that desire had to immediately start lying about them. So it was innocence after all.