He had nothing and so made a random start in order that there would be some kind of sound echoing through the empty rooms. He thought that the past had overborne the present, but it was the present that had squeezed out the past. The name of this emptiness was not familiarity but now. What seemed as if it were the void behind the outlines of things was time flattened to a thin sheet, but time nonetheless, complete and venomous as any snake, with all of its choices inevitable and open, still to be made, as ever. But against time the sense of the present was like listening to a recorded silence through powerful loudspeakers, trembling with loudness foregone. This presence had no history, it was thickly familiar and yet resisted any relations to a self. He could remember what seemed to be its occasions, many in number, but all with this oddly detached quality, the very thing that escapes narration, the only thing that motivates it. To think about it was to try to define it was to move away from it, to take it as a burden, something like boredom, or like guilt, something to act on, to remedy. Everything seemed like an attempt to arouse it or quieten it, to reject it or to rediscover and embrace it finally, closer than ever.