Occasionally he would have the good fortune to have his assumptions thrown back in his face, so that the falseness of a situation that he'd drawn himself into became apparent, together with the gap between his way of construing the world and its pragmatic reality. These experiences ought to have led him to rethink things and to develop new responses that were truer to the more encompassing picture he'd momentarily glimpsed. To do this, however he would have needed to renounce certain pleasing fantasies which he'd spun out of reflections on transient high points in his career, redirecting the imaginative energy that had gone into them into creating new stories in which the essential distinctions that he'd previously ignored were intelligently integrated. The opposite danger was that his reading of what constituted a refutation of his scheme was premature or wrong, but since he'd already gotten as far as he had by means of such reality testing there was no reason to expect it to suddenly start giving false signals. More likely it was that one progressed as far as the cunning of self-love was unequal to reality, after which one adopted a baroque system of epicycles and psychic curlicues to defensively and blind-sightedly steer around the hazards that one refused to acknowledge. He saw himself doing this, taking one fork at the cross-roads when the other meant following truth, and by this choice defining himself irreversibly in the grades of spirit. The knowing that this had been the choice was an essential part of the world that was chosen.