He believed that close attention to the repetitions of ordinary experiences was the pathway to original experience, and this all the more so as it flew in the face of the promotion of novelty in the surrounding culture. To treat this as deliberate paradox would have been a concession he refused to make. Repetition is never perfect, every round is entirely different, but by being distinguished from its predecessors only in minutiae it was easier to seize of the essence of its newness. No overhead goes to the placement and interpretation of a new context, so that the grammatical subdivision of being or of happening into verbal, nominal, adjectival, adverbial, and related phases could be delivered over to introspection. Repetition seemed to him a metaphor for timelessness or eternity but lodged within a strictly finite perceptual context. This meant that the elements that were fresh were subordinated to those which made this into one of a series, caused it to be identified as the series itself, existing in an abstract time, a time more forgiving, less heraclitean, than actual time. But part of the acknowledgement of repetition was the pathos of the desire, it was failed arrest, it was the best we could have done to stop time, the future anterior in the present, and so in its very failure it opening the door to something exquisitely fragile. Just because of the wanting of repetition and its failure the emergence of each moment out of lawless emptiness can be glimpsed.