The start of a new project was its own Spring and always aroused hopes that it was his own nature finally unbound and ready to fill time's stage with a persistent and ever-deepening internality. But to fall in with a project was to fall in with a process and a process always has its arc. The work was to bend that arc into a rough circle or even a decent enough spiral by sheer will, or by sheer love of the past-continuous, the again and again quality of things. He could gorge on fine ideas but these would soon pass through his system and fall away into the past and irrelevance. He was aware of being old, his memory poor, his senses losing keenness, his desire almost dormant. But this also had its gift in the augmented sense of the once and once only quality of time against which strategies of repetition could only play a charming but losing game.