Periods of flatness when you become merely the imitator of yourself as the one who could find significance in anything, beauty in the most random arrangements. This was a skill that was not strengthened by repetition, even though repetition itself and its production of over-familiarity was also just a phenomenon that could be regarded in its eternal essence. What better place could there be for realising the original in the core of the experience than in this world of repetition. It was a surrender of ambition, of projects and the straining after them, as if they were accretions, versions of purpose that you'd picked up because they were definite and because you could not understand your own indefinite purpose. But you can't quite let go of all that, the pole-stars of your will emerge, things you loved, thought fixed, then lost and then returned to. Home is where the question is. And the question is time, the mother of desire and imagining, of the father and mother minds, of the one who sets out on a journey in each moment and never comes back, and of the stranger who always comes back in his place.