How absurd it seemed to to him the saying "I think, therefore I am" when it was only in wanting that he truly emerged into being, so that being itself was incidental to the want, to say nothing of how any act of thought or doubt must first be wished. When wanting fails, I think, and in order to apply thinking I must assume I am, so that being is in the register of residual desire, the part of desire unconsumed by satisfaction. Thinking may perhaps be loud or soft, clear or muddy, fast or slow, but is just as much thinking, whereas the degrees of wanting mark qualitative changes, from the merest inclination to an impossible totality of craving. Is it already an achievement of wanting to know what it is it wants? And has will then evolved only to be the instrument of want? Once there is the power to satisfy desire then it need not be exerted; it is now power that we want, a system a reassurance of how we stand in this world of objects, objects now standing apart and cooling down from the heat in which we'd moulded them. After this the structures that we build out of wanting and thinking become immensely complicated, comically agglutinated, immensely inefficient, surprisingly effective. We take pride in them but don't entirely believe in them as we want and expect others to reassure us about them, or as we put it, respect us. Virtue is to want something more than life. The goal of wanting is to be abolished, but we want to want, and the world is always ready to oblige, always prepared to twist us into the lineaments of unsatisfied desire, broken pride.