For a long time I used to read without finishing the labyrinthine chain of labyrinthine sentences spiraling in and around and through Marcel’s innumerable false starts through aristocracy and eroticism and art—sinuous syntax the ontology of which imposes a simultaneity of selves each jostling for the prize of the present moment which eludes them every time; meantime we are all of us getting older and less recognizable to ourselves and the thirty-six chambers of childhood are receding ever further and farther yet liable until the very last page to be revived in the flesh, giving us back the world.