Hollis arrives at his vocation not through decision but through retrospective recognition — the shape of a life becoming legible only after enough of it has been lived. He did not choose Hermes; Hermes claimed him, apparently before he had the language to know it. That "knew it not" is doing something precise: it refuses the narrative where self-knowledge precedes calling, where you identify your gifts and then deploy them. The actual sequence runs the other way. You are already in service before the service has a name.

Hermes governs the between — boundaries, crossings, the passage of meaning from one register into another. Hermeneutics carries his name because interpretation is never neutral transmission; something is always lost and something else gained in the crossing. To be born into service of that god is to be constitutionally unsuited to final statements, to closed systems, to the comfort of having arrived. The in-between is not a waiting room for somewhere else. It is the location itself. What Hollis is describing, without quite saying it, is that the vocation most native to a person tends to be the one that keeps them in motion — not toward resolution, but inside the very instability that makes meaning possible at all.