- You look pensive, he says.

- Yes, I concede. I'm a little subdued, I suppose: But you must know that I have no reason to be so. It isn't reasonable for me to feel the way I do, and so I'm a little embarrassed for it.

- But I wasn't asking you to be reasonable, he said. Why should you have to be reasonable?

- Well, but then, I mean to say, there's no excuse for it, really. It isn't as if there's any real excuse, anyway.

- But why should you need an excuse to feel sad?

- Well, yes, I said, wondering why I was fighting all this, wondering what I was actually defending beyond my private right to feel the way I did, whether I knew why or not. Seeming to sense my awkwardness, he interjected:

- You don't have to tell me the truth, you know. I don't mind lies. I don't mind anything at all. I don't think anything special about you, and so nothing you say will really surprise me. You can be yourself, or someone else; it's all the same.

- But it isn't the same, I said, because we live in a world in which it's possible for these things to be the same. And that itself is the reason that they should never be the same; that itself is the reason that they deserve to be separate and different, that itself is the reason they deserve to be themselves. Reality is in perpetual threat of losing its grip on us, casting us aside, giving us over as a bad lot; if we're indifferent to the truth, where will it go? What will it leave us with, then? How could we get back to the place where words were true to us again?