He could not tether himself to the high saliences he sometimes experienced, could not be sure of holding on to any ground once gained, and so he worked tirelessly to maintain passage. He was sure that if he stopped struggling he would be drawn into a deep oblivion weighed down by a history of acquiescences, short-cuts and easy surrenders. The soul might respond to a diet of spiritual delicacies and so he strove to extract them out of the muck in which they were usually planted. All this effort for the sake of a nobility that he didn't fully believe in, and which at certain moments disgusted him. Work meant value, and value a system of values, and this in turn meant compensations, equivalences, exchanges and an appetite for position. All the mechanisms of a market, of trafficking, reproduced in the realm of the soul where he'd thought to escape them.