"To express what I feel before nature," he wrote to Gustave Geffroy, the art critic, "I totally forget the most elemental rules of painting, if they exist, every time".
Other parts of his game – his football intelligence, his temperament and one-on-one finishing – have advanced but the electricity, that frisson of excitement that used to exist every time he had the ball, simply isn't there any more and it isn't coming back.
It is far more plausible to think that for any world W that is such that God exists at some time in W, God exists at every time in W. Anselmian theists also typically think that God is essentially (and thus necessarily) omniscient, omnipotent, and maximally good.
Trope persistence is endurantist, that is to say, tropes wholly exist at every time they exist, and that a particular trope at one time is strictly identical to itself at other times.
You could argue that only a perverse reader would mistake my boss's nephew for my acupuncturist, but the point is that when you restrict the use of the serial comma solely to those instances where a genuine ambiguity exists, then every time you come to a series you have to stop and think.
That may well be a defence mechanism, but you do feel immortal, and you knew that obviously the possibility existed, that every time you got up in an aeroplane and flew over Germany you wouldn't come back.
Renault withdrew from Formula One partly because it said that the game was no longer paying off: It had won so many races and been so dominant that the PR value of its victories ceased to exist, while every time a Renault engine failed to win or had a problem, it became a big story.
Trauma exists outside time and beyond words.
"If a capability exists from time to time it will be used," he says.
