The promesse de bonheur is like a sap that circulates through the capillaries of the world, a substance that feeds it and fattens its image in his heart until with time, it thins and, diluted with the distillates of experience, drains away. But still he would encounter one of his never sated thirsts, a scene in a window from another period of life, brighter, unburdened with all he now knew. It would be as if he had once been there, and it was his whole life glimpsed through a fissure in time; he knew what it was like to own all the properties of that world, to think nothing of them at all, but only be cast forward with them in its surprising and never-ending break; and all the more in that he had never inhabited such a moment, had only ever dreamt it from the other side. His intent was for the kind of being that was implicit in these scenes, these advertisements his imagination, feeding on life, came up with to exact his wavering desire. The light they appear in is polarised and if futurity predominates then that is one thing, and if anteriority quite another. Why was it that the latter, for all its sorrows, seemed the preferable light? There must be another promesse altogether, a whiff of sea air, an intimation that the whole structure was not as heavy and inevitable as it seemed, that it could all collapse in an instant.