The aesthetic sensibility does not require the detachment of its object from its reference to reality, but the detaching of reality from its reference. The finer the distinctions that can be perceived the less one seeks to modify or simplify the object, instead rising to see it within the whole of which it is a part, so that in the end one seeks to appreciate reality itself as detached from reality. Appreciation is no small thing, it is a considerable cultural and psychological achievement and carries with it a form of self-transcendence which explains why it can come forward as a substitute for religion. In this way it can seem that there is a large overlap between spiritual reflection and aesthetics, and certainly the world of art is quick to seize a hieratic role, all the more so since, if in its very essence nothing human is foreign to it, it appears to occupy the very ground of the universally and transcendentally human. Why this fails is not entirely clear. Is it that art is inseparable from a certain detachment, no matter how engaged it becomes, and hence that it remains amoral, or is it that its only morality is in its willing thraldom to appearance?

From intent to act and from act to result, this is the line that defines the direction self to world. There is also a current in the opposite direction, from situation to intention - except that in achieving a sense of what the situation is out there there needs to have been a considerable amount of prior traffic originating in the self. What is it that travels along these channels? Signals, representations, models, which are all elements in need of reading, or interpretation, and the framings that bring this about are themselves elements in flux within these circuits. The operations of this system are always subject to obstacles, much of one's intention is expended in remedial activity, or in fine tuning. Intention is close to being equivalent to meaning, but as we move away from pure intention the gap between meaning and what-comes-about grows. If the meaning of an act is only pieced together by us from what we can make of what others show their reactions to have been, then this is only a model or picture of meaning, understood intentionally - that is, via the intentional stance - as a kind of objectivity out there in the world, a factor or modification of the situation. We inhabit this system, and have always inhabited it, although the particularities of it have evolved with our lives, and we are aware of it as a system, as a whole. Both psychology and the novel provide means of reflection on the system in the awareness of the whole, they are sciences of the condition of being immersed in a world, or indeed in the world. They may also be critical reflections since exposing any part of the system reveals errors, short-cuts, path-dependent suboptimalities and so on. Because it is so flexible it is always a mess, and if it is not flexible so much the worse. Spiritual reflection, and the term is meant is to suggest metaphysical questions rather than religious ones, differs from these by putting the entire system in question, as if there is a subject for whom it is (at every moment) contingent. In large doses this is very tedious, but in very small and measured ones such as we find in Proust, for example, it is infinitely more powerful than the other kinds.

Adultery and vampirism (the latter broadly understood as to include such works as Middlemarch and Great Expectations) form the themes, or the kernels in the themes, of a great number of novels, and many among the greatest. There is a common idea in these of concealment, and the powers of concealment, its price, and what needs and is worthy of concealing. A new romantic connection, the event of such a connection, numbs out the emotional pattern of the prior relationship but in an odd way. The latter can still function but as disconnected, as going on by its own momentum but now irrelevant to, or merely a threat to be evaded by, the new world your heart has found itself in and which fills it completely. There is an adulterous version of the topos of lovers creating their own private world, shutting out the common world, but in this variant they leave behind phantoms of themselves which continue to appear and to fill their functions in that common world. It is an example of a pattern of feelings and functions being systematically detached from its roots in reality but still able to continue by drawing its energy from habit and other secondary sources, an energy of the simulacrum being itself no more than a simulacrum of energy. One of these worlds is that of life and the other of after-life, but it is not entirely certain which is which (cf. Tristan). This is displacement into fictionality, as is the peculiar poignancy of the lovers' fragile floating world, which is also patently fictional. The point being that novelism, no matter that it often pretends to be an innocent expression of the youthful relish for adventure and exploration, draws on undercurrents of imaginative energy of unexpected intensity and intent.

The novel, a closed world made out of words in which various characters, including the narrator or authorial point of view, attempt to solve the life problems that arise for them or for other characters, problems that are themselves products of worlds made out of words, or rather of the making of worlds out of words, these inner worlds being open and fragmentary relative to the frame which encloses them. What is novelistic is the mode of imaginative and invested thinking and feeling involved in this structure - the subject to its substance. If the novel is life recreated at a desk, or in a bed, or at a cafe table, the conscious merging of the scene of action with the scene of inscription, then the novelistic is the same operation viewed from the side of life. It is a technology of mind and its great achievement was the invention of psychology in a form that seems now to be waning or at least dispersing with the fortunes of the novel, its dissolution or mutating into the visual or videographic. It is curious what a large role jealousy has played in the construction of the novelising mind if by the loose term jealousy we mean all of the passions that are connected with the inflamed and defensive imaginations of exclusion from the secret and especially sexual joys of others. This mind which seeks to realise itself through investigation of the satisfaction of others and ultimately of itself - they are the same thing, only inverted - can never come to the end of its quest since it is always gloriously pointing away from its own origin, to turn back on which would be to die.

There are certain core concerns that each of us have, or not so much concerns as complex sets of moves, repositionings and translations, that do the work of a sort of central bank of self-regard in which we can, as a last resort, exchange all our bad debts, our worthless shares and failed speculations, all the ambiguities that have served us too well, exchange them at the lowest rates, saving ourselves again and again from bankruptcy or merely embarrassment. Viewed as a bank, it would always appear to be a subsidiary of one of the great idols of the tribe, being for example, the bank of virtue or the common good, or the bank of art or of purified form, or the bank of the body or care of the self - but these terms must be understood in a very general way and as pointing to something which the individual mind or persona takes to be real. For him it seemed that it was art that occupied this position, despite his lack of interest in and almost disdain for the purely sensory modes of this particular spiritual mutation - call it instead the novelistic. As a character formation it was doubtless also a means for exposing the world and himself, and by the same gesture concealing himself and the world ever more deeply. But it should not be thought of as defining his complacency, but rather his particular and recurrent abjection.

Social life requires something like a form of re-presentation, a defining of a field of operation and a symbolisation of the various agents included within its boundary, including the reflexive - something like this but on a level far upstream of the synaptic, since we can find effective optimisation strategies practised even by single celled organisms, to say nothing of what might be found in viruses. It is out of strategic purposefulness that we are endowed with a fundamental insincerity, and it is out of this that we must distill our notions, and practices (dare one say praxis!) of sincerity, cut to the shape of what we take to be our best selves. Presumably for a dog or a horse the issue doesn't arise and lovers of these animals are periodically scandalised when some blunt-speaking ethologist is reported in the news to have accused their darlings of a sophisticated form of opportunism. Dogs, however, wear their good faith with marvelous aplomb, as cats their selfishness. On the other hand it is simply part of the logic of life, and not the least cunning, that we should be for so long mistaken about the logic of life. What the mind grasps clearly and distinctly is for that very reason meant to be taken in just this way, to bar the way to what is unclear and indistinct, precisely for our own good - as long we understand the 'us' here in a suitably impersonal way. We occupy the space between the feeling and the sign of the feeling. If we couldn't write out cheques on our attentive feeling, indeed on our empathy, such as it is, even if limited pretty much to ourselves, then all our relationships would collapse. Indeed talk of cheques is asking too much, it is enough to offer payment by plastic.

If relationship, as a force oblique to their individual wills which draws two parties into the field of each other's recognition, is mediated by an exchange, by something passing from one to the other, or both ways, and generally more rarefied than a heart, then the substance of this exchange represents a certain commerce between souls. In the first place the exchange is of something immediately felt, of patent value, and only later, and this is where relationship proper begins, is it a promise and a faith. The analogy with money seems obvious, and although it is limited, it suggests all kinds of curious variations. One might contrast liquid with illiquid assets, spending one's capital with living from the interest, or consider rates of exchange, convertibility, or what it would mean to invest or to speculate in shares, in futures or in options. Most important is the fact that the conditional nature of the instruments of exchange means that two parties are never enough; where there is an exchange of acts of faith there must always be a third party, often in collective form, to guarantee, to witness, and to enforce the transaction. This is all aimed at social behaviour, and despite the colourful terminology that arises with money as being the most general of currencies, it seems natural to suppose that it is the economic register that was modelled upon it, as being very much the prior. None of this yet speaks to the ontological level that underpins currency itself. If in the words of the old song, 'you're nobody 'till somebody loves you', what is this mysterious and fragile market-making which transforms a nobody into a somebody?