Passion was like an alien self implanted within him. What did he have to do with it, but for the fact that it demonstrated again and again that it knew him far better than he knew it? The authority of others asserted itself in his viscera, heteronomy checked his every move, the frustrations and impasses of family history which he'd thought to have surmounted, reappeared within his body, in a different register, but almost unchanged. Worn away by time, as it now was, it no longer possessed the same power to bedevil him, but he found the energy and the instrument that remained weak and almost useless. He could peel some shells away from his mind but the light beneath was mostly feeble. It was as if the life story had finally won, it had nailed whatever was timeless, some kind of light that had perhaps once flared up, he was no longer sure, firmly to the scaffold of time. As the story had always insisted, there was nothing to do now but await the executioner. He wondered what it was he had been looking for with such intent, something he could never quite name, a self behind his self for which the very idea of purposive action and hence of participation in the dream is impossible. And more that this that it should reveal itself to be what he truly was, more fully and more completely than anything extrapolated, imagined or given from within the dream. He wondered how such a belief could have arisen? What would all his inquiries be worth without it, because at some point they would need to go on without it, persisting in his folly because it was too late to turn back. If the dream made perfect sense then he'd have to admit that it had all been a sad mistake, but somehow it didn't. As it bore down on him with all its weight and its terrible panoply, and as his own strength failed, he still could not submit to it.