Worrying at the endlessly evolving problem of life, we try to map the shape of our particular bondage, to find its limits, and perhaps its weak points. The tools are the same as those of novelists and memoirists: recurrent themes, accidents, reflections, the mysterious forces in attachments, the reverberations of history, and the instabilities resulting from too much self-consciousness, too much anticipation, too little memory. Things become buried, secreted, there are losses too hard to bear, and shameful victories; there is something to protect, us from them, them from us, complex alliances to balance, multiple selves are brought on to negotiate a many-layered world and its confusion of rewards and punishments. It never seems to get simpler, despite our longing for a wisdom that would reduce it all down a few basic operations, but as we understand more we find more variables that can't be ignored. There is no unreasonable effectiveness of some tool, say of psychoanalysis or spirituality, but only the vaguely dawning awareness that we have misunderstood the problem from the first, misunderstood it as a problem, created ourselves out of this misunderstanding, in a joyous affirmation of the zeitgeist, no matter how miserable it may have made us.