The blackness behind his closed eyelids became like a free fall into blue-black depths, the phosphorescences that had once made a sort of three-dimensional screen in front of his face had faded with the reflexes that sustained them, of which they were the nervous traces. These had been an excitement and an anxiety, an echo of a stage-fright, an expectation of a time to gratify all wishes, and hence a validation of the one who wished, the wisher, wrapped up in himself and his space of enjoyment. For him all the lives that could still have been his, the books of experience he would pile up, so endlessly variegated and marvellous with their landscapes that he would absorb into his pulp like so many poems. But it turned out that living meant something entirely different, it was the experience of the collapse of possibility through choice. To choose was to choose recurrence, to choose that which ought to recur and then to surrender all his chaotic desire into it, to bury it. The experience of time was not the gathering of vintages but this collapse. All the phases were nothing more, be they of anticipation, initiation, consummation, withdrawal, retrospect, return, as if it were a process that recurred, that kept its anonymity and left you none the wiser. But if instead it were the coming loose of the bonds of identification, the internal cancellation of projects, of the project of projects, the opening of that deeper space, then one minute of such awareness would be worth more than ten years of mere experiences, no matter how superb they might still be.