There are certain core concerns that each of us have, or not so much concerns as complex sets of moves, repositionings and translations, that do the work of a sort of central bank of self-regard in which we can, as a last resort, exchange all our bad debts, our worthless shares and failed speculations, all the ambiguities that have served us too well, exchange them at the lowest rates, saving ourselves again and again from bankruptcy or merely embarrassment. Viewed as a bank, it would always appear to be a subsidiary of one of the great idols of the tribe, being for example, the bank of virtue or the common good, or the bank of art or of purified form, or the bank of the body or care of the self - but these terms must be understood in a very general way and as pointing to something which the individual mind or persona takes to be real. For him it seemed that it was art that occupied this position, despite his lack of interest in and almost disdain for the purely sensory modes of this particular spiritual mutation - call it instead the novelistic. As a character formation it was doubtless also a means for exposing the world and himself, and by the same gesture concealing himself and the world ever more deeply. But it should not be thought of as defining his complacency, but rather his particular and recurrent abjection.