The inner life becomes apparent when the options and hence the attractions of the life in pursuit of desire begin to wither. It is not that new inner powers are awakened, or created, or imagined into existence, but only that they are revealed slowly as the noise of the outer fades, and as the sharp shock of frustration fractures old habits and raises fresh alertness. Desires, with their latent promise, require that you be in love; most intensely when this is with someone else, but most reliably and almost enduringly when you are in love with yourself. Enjoyment is a shared space and you need a reflection of yourself in the act to be fully at home in it. Desire never goes away, even if it is reduced to the sorry condition of the desire to desire, but the inner life is a change in the nature, or better, of the treatment and use of desire, just as fasting is not a rejection of the gratification of eating but a modification of it. Blocking the arc of desire leads to an awareness of the forging of desire, of how this desire is shaped out of the basic matter of desire which runs deeper than any cogito. It is the most historical thing imaginable, reaching way back into the past, though your own past and beyond the earliest glimmerings of personal memory.