Something about her in this moment strikes him as being familiar. The motion of her arm? The shape of her hand? The wrinkle of her upper lip? He does not know. Nor does he have any way to tell whether what he is sensing is a fragment of memory, a fragment of an idea of a memory, or something his mind, desperate for connections, has created on its own.
You might say that S. has only himself to blame, that it is entirely his choice to fight this fight, to live a life of vigilant somnolence or somnolent vigilantism, to allow himself to be satisfied with Sola in the margins of his manuscripts instead of in his arms, and you might be right. But you ought to understand, too, that there's an attrition that takes place inside, one in which options and choices and even desires are ground ever smaller until finally their existence can no longer be confirmed by observation or weight or displacement but only by faith. Until desire is a ghost.