The rich set of feelings and memories evoked by art and most of all by music produced the sense of an intimate self which was at the same time utterly private and known to be shared by masses, shareable by anyone. It was in the very inmost quality of this intimacy that it was common, both in fact and in principle. Its purpose was to be both unique and current, and thus an artifact whose value was readily acknowledged and irreplaceable. This was a version of identity, and was a function that simulated an essence, but only at one remove - it had to appear as unitary, but could only appear so if it was the content of a relationship, and it had to show that it saw the contradiction and could confidently affirm that it was only apparent. To know you exist you need to first convince others you exist, which is not at all the same thing; but the first, and sometimes the last, of these others is yourself. Loving a certain musical composition, feeling that it expressed something ineffable and deep, was to display a receptivity that identified you, but only by way of the public identity of its author. Thus identity was a set of relationships resting on a prior identity, or else it was the inversion of this, assuming a prior identity so as to underwrite an other's identity. That some of its terms could be collapsed onto each other mattered not at all to the infernal operation of this machine.