In desire you vividly picture the scene of your satisfaction, or rather such a scene flashes upon you, but not from elsewhere, rather as an elaboration of a distant and intimate promise, the very promise of life. It is more like a 'selfie' than a tableau from out of a narrative, but seen from the point of view of the other you carry with you, the witnessing self with whom you can never coincide. The you in the picture must be real and hence yet to come; desire stretches your longing out in front of you, but with the passing of time you come to the sad realisation that the occasion of this personage has already passed and that it somehow neglected to realise him. The mechanism of desire continues to work in the same way as ever but its promises are treacherously anachronistic, and strangely all the purer for that. With its stubborn faith worn down by common day, the pure and dreamlike essence of desire is revealed, grinning like a skull, your very own. In time you come to know the bitter element of time. Again, it might bring back a specific occasion, some fork you stood at once, all unknowingly, and you see how little choice you really had, how little you knew. But in the scenes that memory awakens in this way there is no consciousness, only irony. Consciousness is too fine and passes like water through the sieve of remembrance.