His quirks had by this time assumed a fixed quality and had taken on the status of constellations in his heavens, they were faces of destiny and by that measure all baleful, but that didn't prevent him from as often worshipping himself in their image, as cowering under their lashes. The understanding of such accretions in the self could fall under the cultural headings either of impurity or of sin, and they could be seen accordingly as released by death or forever fixed by it. He suspected that ultimately one did not get to choose one's metaphor. The fact that one is grasping something does not make the object real, only the act of grasping, but in the psychic sphere this act is not a holding which must grow fatigued and release itself, but more like that of a plant which invests its life in the form it takes, hardening rather than tiring, but nevertheless remaining alive and in act. To understand evil as sin was the way of his culture and retained a deeper hold on his imagination than any other, but this understanding itself seemed to him to be no more than an impurity of mind.