What he saw as flatness - as a dull mind in a dense world, as at best a texture which which the eye could not fix, like being in a wind that swept his thoughts away with the dust raised from the streets - was also a secret to be cracked. This was the essence of mind and had never ceased from being so by the merest iota and yet required a commentary to be realised.  As an aesthetic problem he would have wanted to counterpose desire or whatever it is that persuades the soul from its torpor, but that would be solving the problem by overriding the circumstances that gave rise to it, and therefore no solution at all. The clue was rather in such instances as the words used to delineate the awareness of dejection being able flash forth with a peculiar and undejected freshness. The ideas are always a copy of something but the words, being in time, are not so. What is familiarity as an event in time? Not simply an experience but also a commentary on experience, divided in its essence between parties, times and selves. The experiencer who acquiesces and accepts the charge of this stale time is a resultant of contained forces, a virtual node in an impasse of reflexes of mind. The forces have no memory, no mood, no restraint, no ownership, and yet what they assemble for the moment to bear against the world has them all.