That there was this presence or that self or not, was all a part of the engrossing adventure of being himself. For all that it was an approach to disinterest, his interest in it became consuming, so that his awareness of how it was with the others around him would grow dim and distorted. The inevitable occurrence of a signal omission would bring his failure of empathy before him and he would feel deeply ashamed not so much of the inaccuracy of his sketches of others, since there was no standard of perfect fidelity here, but of the low dimensionality of the space he had assigned to them in his simulation of the world. If there was a freedom that he owed to himself then the proper expression of this should have been in the degrees of freedom he accorded in his relationships. To be exposed as having crudely schematised others revealed priorities that were incompatible with the freedom and disinterest that he affected. This was a purely internal source of shame that cut deeply and repeatedly without recourse to ethics, except perhaps in a vaguely Spinozan sense.