The world seemed so fascinating with its micro-tones and subtle variegations that he often mistook it for his object. And then as time succeeded time the relish at discovering yet one more unsuspected twist in the very familiar would slowly give way to flatness, to a casting about in memory for a way of regaining all those splendid values such as he could imagine writing home about. Thoughts of such a writing home, or its cognates, would come to fill his mind, and even the world he'd started out with would be replaced by another filmy layer of mediation. His error was to have forgotten not merely his object but the function of the world in relation to it. The nature of this object was such that it could not grow stale, even though it was always identically the same. The entire interest of anything which momentarily appeared interesting was drawn from the promise that it might bring that sole object closer to the focus of attention. The trouble was that the object itself was pure disinterest; its promise was necessarily empty, nothing could be brought closer, nothing sent home.