Whenever a new train of thought ignited in him he would follow it in the belief that it could bring him closer to the centre, that in the need for articulation which he was responding to there was a corrective understanding of the truth of the situation. When some time had passed and he could look back at one of these forays then the blind spot would be evident, always essentially the same one, namely the belief itself, the scenario of desire for all that was closer, more central. The inward perspectives revealed in thoughts were always seductive, often gorgeous, and even if they were drab, were drab in a charming way, and yet they always partook of abstraction, which is another way of describing a controlled forgetting of the most simple, most proximate, most empty nature of events. The deep darkness of the background aroused a mixture of nostalgia and self-conscious bedazzlement, which were the seeds of the latest thinker.