He wanted to write about way things happen and go on happening, so soft and frictionless, peaceful and insufficient, to cut into the rind of it, and how he always found himself in the aftermath of turbid passions at the start or at the end of another day. The mind as an active organ was, he found, a weak and treacherous agent beside the passive mind forever brushed by events that leave sensations dying fall, like distant traces through the mist. It could not be a simple matter for the brain to amalgamate this before me into tree and this tree to the tree seen, or maybe not quite seen, the day before and so on through all its changes with the seasons and the light. If he could watch it at its work of building a world, of building an observer of a world and of himself, out of all this generic stuff, in, as they say, real time, so that he could say, 'Look there, that little circle of lights, that's the observer. See how I tickle it and it shakes me to the soul, strings out a long chain of other selves, subject-objects like a trick with mirrors, and I am all of them and none of them at once,' then the mind might be uprooted from its incessant wool-gathering and finally stand aghast in wonder.