He'd come close enough, on a few occasions, to the kind of unburdening and regathering he aspired to that he had a sense of what it would be like. While it was valued as the true expression of himself he had to admit that the voice inseparable from it was not his own familiar voice, but a lyrical voice, and hence an ideal voice. It offered no solution to even the everyday conundrum of the disjunction between the creative and appreciative moods. Still, he thought a natural attraction would pull him into it. This idea was a consequence of a feature of that very voice, namely its lowness, its quality of having yielded to gravity, its affinity with a melancholy of the most soothing kind. Everything which added to his weight seemed to promise the inevitability of a collapse of the floodgates, an outpouring, a release from below. In this spirit he welcomed the dissipation of hope, the disassociation from pictures of a wonderful future, the weakening power of the defenses that held it all up. Increasing age, it turned out, instead of stripping away the inessential and revealing the essential, did something else, it made him more himself, caused him to crystallise around the quirks and deviations that had always been his. The kind of skittish foolishness and the coarse and hasty discernment that were the enemies of simple unclouded vision had increased at least in proportion to the mature disillusionment. He took on roles, posed as much as ever, and believed in the roles, perhaps believed in them more than ever, now that the roles included the layered pretense at no longer believing in them. In this he participated intimately in the age's futile attempts to throw off irony after its treachery had become evident.