To believe it possible to change course is to misunderstand the journey-like quality of experience by taking the landscape as somehow fixed and our movement through it as a progress directed by an ever more enlightened, or simply more clued-in, navigator. The situation of life is the throwing out of a succession of these dream-like complete scenes, these stanzas with actor, motive, context, obstacle and goal all integrated, and the illusion of depth in which the subject defines his freedom an inveterate effect of structural parallax. Where there was work done, undeniably, because we always know when we have put in an effort, where new habits are installed crowding out old habits we believe that real change has been achieved, and if the change is less than we had hoped for we can't deny that all that work must have amounted to something. And it gives us something to talk about over coffee, sitting at a table by the side of the way, in a new place that has suddenly appeared and whose unaccountable fitness to our new self we don't seek to question. So while it is dismaying to discover that none of the old places has ever been left behind, that the worst of times, the most clueless, belongs as much to the unchanging quality of this thing, this upwelling out of nowhere, as the best, that we won't ever be once and for all some renovated self, it is also the only positive as well, since it points to the simple fact that there has never been anywhere to get to, that even the best of journeys was never the point, that we are always at exactly the same distance from the gateless gate, the unmotivated, unprompted, impossible collapse of time's lure.