The imagining of a transformation in the experience of living that would render it  a sort of paradise seemed impossible to him, if the sense of this being his life was to be preserved. He had come to identify,in whatever situation he found himself, with the consistency of doubt and uncertainty about being and knowing himself. Absent the insecurity and fear of annihilation and things may seem wonderfully new-born, but the memory of who he was now would fade like a long sad dream, to revive only, perhaps, if a parallel discontent were to arise in the new life. Earlier, in looking towards his personal utopia, he'd insisted that there would need to be a retroactive redemption of all past time. This appeared to involve a meticulous return to each moment of failed striving for deeper recollectedness and its repetition with a correction or adjustment. He imagined seeing that in each such moment the very failure to see had been the missed seeing and that the door to eternity had been standing open in the very experience of time passing. He would then understand that behind the sequential appearance of time there was a different and timeless ordering of experience. But now there was no such projection. There had been far too many days that it was impossible to imagine any of them retaining an identity. They seemed, now that they dwelt only in memory, to be worth little more than fictions, as ephemeral as smoke. Now it was the enigmatic and strictly finite collection of future moments that seemed to harbour secrets that might be worth the effort to discover, precisely because, as death grew closer, the sense of his particular being became more concentrated, needing not at all to rely on memory.