Every response begins in spontaneity and then is revealed as belonging to some personage modelled out of debris of memory and habits of thought and parts of yet other half-remembered personages. The tenor was often of a character put upon by tides of feeling he'd not seen coming, and by a cascade of events too fast for him to put in any order. A character justifying himself for injured innocence or in an avowed conspiracy of mischief, like a charming villain's aside, and best of all the combinations of innocence and villainy. Sometimes everybody seemed to be talking in these ways, casting lights on themselves or oblique reflections on others. Only a minimum of self-consciousness was needed to reveal the façades in a succeeding moment, after the action was over, but still clearly enough that you are led to look behind this exhausted mask to the next and deeper mask. A character belongs to a play and the plays get more elemental as you go deeper down, like the dramas reverting to myth. Up here everything is mediated by interpreted possibilities, appearing random while enriched by knowledge and precedent, but there those primal selves acted with extraordinary simplicity and fatality. What you are cannot be separated from those events, those crimes and sacrifices, those lives inexplicably saved and lost, your linear time never gets free of their eternal present, and those who were with you then are still with you now, even if they appear to be the most absurdly hesitant and innocuous beneficiaries of their crimes.