What you do has become a habit and a duty. What has become of the original motive? Well, that's just what has undergone such changes, although these are more of emphasis than nature. You persist in order to encounter your motive for persisting. Sometimes it seems no more than the higher nostalgia, not exactly an attempt to stop time by entering a picture: first rediscovering that particular and very specific picture that has haunted your dreams and to a lesser extent your waking life since you first set out and then becoming the very figure in the picture in an infinitude of telescoping meanings. Not so much this as finding what or who it is that took on this peculiar task and why. You can't let it go until you have realised it, fully and completely. It is the recovery of a realisation that was strongest in early childhood. That would be the way in which every seemingly lost time could be recovered, and then the step beyond, the one and only thing you had to do.