Walking the same streets for so many years, doing the same errands, putting in time in the same rooms, he kept seeing certain recurrent faces which he could observe over time as they grew old, and he would know by that that he too was growing old in the same way, was moving side by side with them in the same river. They seemed to grow into themselves, these faces, and to grow more damaged and more distant, descending ever deeper into their own caves. Unable to see himself directly he needed these reflections, as plain as the mug of any man in the street, so that he could see in regard to his own ventures, his own ambitions, that they were not directed for an assault on truth using cunning tools forged in the mind that shared in the ruthless clarity of those of science, but rather that they were a circling around a central phantasm. The process, it shocked him to discover, was the continual generation of copies of himself, a continuous stream of slowly mutating souls. There was no option of renouncing it, of backing out of this viral self-generation, since there was no will outside the what was re-created, breath by breath, in the process, and so at these intermittent moments of unveiling, which of course were no deviation but also recurred if more rarely, the only choice was the paradoxical one of resuming yet more strongly.