There was a tendency in the culture, to which he was not entirely immune, to frame life as experience, as consisting of what can be told. The narratives, long and short, complete and incomplete, which form the weave of this understanding occupy a distinct region on the surface of a turbulent sea of fused intelligence in which person, world and situation are undistinguished. Something of this fluidity emerges in dreams, but the waking self is tightly limited by its negotiations between its own relative constancy and the incessant change delivered by the world; it is required to respond to the unpredicted, and what is unpredicted or unpredictable keeps pace with its developing repertoire. He considered that it was the soul of the world dreaming all these lives, his own and all those around him, and he wondered what the interest could be in so much unoriginality. The answer, perhaps, was that it was not the selves that were interesting but their ability to respond to random events. The selves were merely the calibrations which made possible the extraordinary variety and patternings of randomness. In this way he took pleasure in his affinity with the soul of the world, in sharing its unquenchable delight in the myriad fallings out of the unforeseen.