How real is it, the entire system of the protected self, or rather the self that appears as the stake in the system of protection? What is it to function as if from a self in contrast to just functioning? Is there something that is picked up, taken on, believed, adopted, or worn like a mask; and where was the choice, the chooser, when it seems just one more thing handed on with language and all its associated baggage? Or is it picked up, not really irresistible but inevitable in an idle way like a dollar you've suddenly noticed by your feet in the street, or was it passed to you with a certain fanfare, something whose importance was in the eye of the giver and which you'd have as soon refused, except you needed to stay on their good side? Born out of love and out of blood, it is a kind of gravitational pull towards safety, protection, barriers, strategic distinctions which might be designed to look as though they are only concerned with pushing further out when they are really drawing in anything they can get hold of. Is it a bad thing, in itself or necessarily, an unbalanced assault on the elegance of the entire space? It was clearly an intervention of some sort and once begun it needed to play itself out. It had an irreducible or untranslatable character and would be solved on its own terms or not at all. And every question that it raised was part of this character, but the questions were not irreducible or untranslatable, in fact their only possible resolution was not in an answer but in a happy series of translations, a series of progressively better specified questions, the last of which was void.