He could never get beyond the complexity of relationship with others. As long as there were others there would be this engendering of psychology as the ever changing fractal boundary between two realms. But psychology, he came to realise, is only a machine for creating more psychology and contains no understanding of what relationship is, although it is perhaps a symptom of it. What is at stake in relationship, it seemed to him, is union or fusion, and psychology is a ramifying set of fine distinctions aimed at foreclosing the possibility of this end. It may in fact be that the end is unachievable, but it makes a very big difference whether one takes this impossibility as axiomatic or not. It surprised him to observe that whenever this vanishing point of union was taken as reachable, even in a well-recognised virtuality, it was always treated as a sovereign good and clearly knowable as such. Even tales of doomed lovers where union spelt fatality backed this up, Paolo and Francesca damned but unsundered, Tristan and Isolde annihilated in their own nirvana. This was perhaps another and negative form of the idea of thrownness, the sense that we have been cut loose from an original unity to wander lost and solitary. And in dreams, how many times had he met the beloved face to face?