On this particular night, just after they had tried to turn over to me her purse, her comb, her cigarette holder, I found and touched this — a selected combination, details of the bas-relief. I had never touched this particular knob before and shall never find it again. This moment of conscious contact holds a drop of solace. The emergency brake of time. Whatever the present moment is, I have stopped it. Too late. In the course of our, let me see, twelve, twelve and three months, years of life together, I ought to have immobilized by this simple method millions of moments; paying perhaps terrific fines, but stopping the train.

It bristled with farcical anachronisms; it was suffused with a sense of gross maturity (as in Hamlet the churchyard scene); its somewhat meagre setting was patched up with odds and ends from other (later) plays; but still the recurrent dream we all know (finding ourselves in the old classroom, with our homework not done because of our having unwittingly missed ten thousand days of school) was in Krug’s case a fair rendering of the atmosphere of the original version.

Krug reasons in his dream worse than a drunken fool; but a closer inspection (made when the dream-self is dead for the ten thousandth time, and the day-self inherits for the ten thousandth time those dusty trifles, those debts, those bundles of illegible letters) reveals the presence of someone in the know.

Human beings, he said, were so many vessels containing unequal portions of this essentially uniform consciousness. It was, however, quite possible, he maintained, to regulate the capacity of the human vessels.

No, the average vessels are not as simple as they appear, it is a conjuror’s set and nobody, not even the enchanter himself, really knows what and how much they hold.