Do you ever convince people to go through with it? After some point? I asked the interlocutor. He shook his head. Never, never. Then, he thought better of it, of this thing he had said, and he began to speak: There was a man who came to me, right at the beginning, said the interlocutor. I was not very good at this job, yet. I didn’t know exactly how to go about doing it. No one did, really. We were still working out all those things, for ourselves and for each other. But, then, at that time, there were many people, as there always are, who needed our help. We could not fail to do the job because we didn’t know how to do it. Then, at that time, not knowing how to do the job, we still had to do the job. It was in this way that we learned the work, and came to our present expertise. In any case, this man, this case that I am telling you about, he came to me first thing in the morning. We have a consensus, we who do this work, said the interlocutor, that the people who come first thing in the morning are the ones in the greatest danger. It is easy to feel at night, or in the loathsome stretch of the afternoon, that all things are near to their end. But, in the morning, the bright morning, to wake and go forth, and feel utterly confined to a brittle wash of apathy or misery, that is something else. So, when he arrived in the morning time, right when I was arriving, in fact, I had a premonition. He was a librarian, and a poet. He had published many books of his verse. This is what the secretary said to me, coming into my office ahead of him, in order to fill me in. I’m just filling you in on the details, she said to me. Nowadays, I would never allow such a thing. As you can see, we operate entirely without secretaries. They are unimportant in this enterprise. Also unimportant is — to be warned of anything. All that I need to know, the person himself, he or she will tell me. And that is crucial. The interlocutor became very animated. He shook his fist. It is crucial that a person be allowed to pierce the veil of their appearance and show me the person that he or she really is, beyond the apparent state of his/her being. But, at the time, he continued sadly, I hadn’t yet worked those things out, and so I was forewarned. I called the man in. In fact, I had read a book of his poems before. I actually owned one book of his poems, given to me by a friend. They were wonderful poems. I dislike poetry, as it is mostly bad, the interlocutor confided to me, but when poems are good, they are better than anything, better than cinema, novels, theater, song, so said the interlocutor. He was speaking on and on, and I realized I had lost track of what he was saying. I was tired, and I had practically drifted off, but not into sleep. I was just numb, sitting there numb. He was still talking, and I tried to listen. He said, there are, though, only a few good poems, and this man had written one or two of them. I made the mistake of, during our speech, as he told me what he expected for his life going forward and how he wanted nothing to do with it, I made the mistake of actually employing a turn of phrase that he himself used in one of his poems. I don’t know how it happened, I must have, my mind must have been repeating the poem quietly to itself as he spoke, comparing his speech with what I had read, and so the phrase was there, in the ether, and I snatched it up, trying to say something calm and gentle to him. But, rather than saying something calm and gentle to him, I triggered the worst conceivable reaction. Whereas before I had spoken, the place we were sitting was completely safe, was a calm, cool place for him to be, a sort of perch from which he could look out on other lives — a place from which he could go out without the clothing of his own life, to seek new things, whereas it had been that, as soon as I spoke, it suddenly became a place where he was known, where he might be remarked upon. In that moment he lost his humanity, and became a kind of organ grinder. It was as though I had asked him to dance like a bear. But, perhaps it was all for the best, continued the interlocutor, because, and the reason I am telling you all this is still to come, it forced me to come up with a formulation that could rise above the error I had made, and bring him back to peace. Just as you have a sense of yourself, and propagate that sense of yourself with your tales and personal legends, so he had the same. His was, though, completely poisoned. He was as weak as a child, not in that chair where you sit, but in another very much like it, not in this office, but another precisely like it, the mirror of it. I said to him, it is a fallacy to divide thing from thing, and it brings us all our pain. You have spent so long discriminating, finding the least possible, finest discriminations until you are capable of saying how this leaf differs from that, or the way in which a window, an unapproachable window high overhead, can contain all our feelings of helplessness, that you now seek only to divide, even when you think you seek nothing. We have a help that can be offered to you. You can resume, can easily resume, the business of being a person — not this person, or that person, but a person. And you can stay that way. We can provide you with an unspecific life. And so, for the first time, I broke the rules. We are never to attempt to convince anyone. That is not our job. But, I felt certain, sitting there, that I had taken away the purpose with which he had arrived, and that he would never come again. In fact, I convinced him to take the cure. I administered it to him that very day. A digression, he said, quite a digression, but an answer to your question. I will always try to give you the truth if you ask me for it. He adjusted his suit and looked up and down the pant leg, as if there were something there. I had been listening to him, but not carefully. I was still in the mountains, still pretending in my own way to be sitting with Rana, looking at her, and being looked at by her. So, I continued, telling the interlocutor, saying to the interlocutor that I have never had much thought for myself. I said, continuing, I have always drifted from place to place, thinking myself the least of the matters near to me. I have never felt wronged when someone has gone on ahead of me. But, she, she would feel wronged, I could imagine, hearing her speak of me, on my behalf. What she thought of me was far more than what I thought of myself. And so, she wanted nothing more than to talk of plans. Her idea of our future was a large and bountiful one. All the ideas that she wove spread out like ink in water — we would have a garden, a house with a garden. There would be a garden on the roof of the house, and on the wall that ran around the house. The paths would be made of stone and moss. The house would have thick glass windows like portholes. No, it would have no windows, none at all. We would be living outside, essentially, in the garden. No, we would live under the house in a kind of burrow, and emerge now and then into a garden, a garden we spent most of our time tending. It would be cool there in the summer and warm in the winter. It could be outfitted with fine wood like a nordic spa. It could be marvelous. The windows could be paper. Whenever they tore, we could simply place another window there. She became gripped and her ideas ran on and on, on and on. I felt that it was disturbing her, that this talk of our future was making her weak. I was sure that she was growing weaker. It seemed that the altitude and this flurry of speeches, one speech after another that she was giving to me or I to her, were tiring her. But, she became angry, and actually said coldly to me, if I didn’t want to have such conversations, we need not do so. Of course, I wanted to — and so we did. Then, suddenly she was happy again. We sat on the daybed of the house, and she said, do you know what, I once earned a degree. A degree, I asked. A degree, she said. Sitting there on the daybed, she told me that she had once earned a degree in philosophy. The school where I went, they only taught philosophy. It was a college just for that. We would take courses in math and science and literature, but all of it, only in the service of philosophy. The idea was, she related to me, that everything is useless without philosophy, because, not having the proper philosophy, one will never know how to apply anything, how to apply the things one knows. Then, one can only mimic other people, follow after them. One can never apply anything in one’s own right. She told me that she had taken a course with a professor, that he had offered a course on a man named Jens Lisl. Lisl was a great philosopher, she said, but he was mostly unknown, and no one wanted to take the class, no one but Rana, and so the professor, who already had a high opinion of her, he told her that they could make the course a thesis course, and that she could write a thesis on Lisl, if she was so interested in him. She laughed, telling me this. She had signed up for the course on a whim, because she liked the name, Jens Lisl. But the professor was sure that he had intimations of her seriousness. He called her to his office, actually to his office in the ivy-run school building, past the secretary, and all the other offices, and he sat her down and he said, Miss Nousen. I think that you are more serious than most, and I believe that you can make a contribution to the efforts that have so far gone forward in the study of Lisl. Lisl, Jens Lisl! She laughed. A name I did not even know. I had not read Lisl yet, I said. I am sure of it, he told me. This is a certain proposition. So, the last two years of my study, I did not take regular classes, as the way was with all the other students, but I took this one class, Lisl, with this one professor, and we wrote several papers, actually together, my contributions and his, about Lisl. I mentioned then to Rana, so I told the interlocutor, that I had never heard of Jens Lisl. No one has heard of him, she said. He is a sort of amalgam, as it turns out. He is an amalgam that serves as the core of a philosophy of inevitability. It is also sometimes called Modern Inevitability, or, the New Inevitability. It is a rethinking of determinism. We worked on these ideas for two years together. I was nineteen when we began, nearly twenty, and when we were through, I was twenty-two. I graduated, and never thought about any of it again, really. Sometimes, the professor sends me letters, but I don’t read them. I believe, she said, that he was in love with me. You like to say that, I said. She blushed. She was always very serious. I do think that he was in love with me. I told her it wouldn’t surprise me. Everyone would fall in love with her, given time. But, not if they know how I really am, she said, the way you do. At that point, I said, most would abandon you. I agreed with her, and told her that anyone, actually getting to know her, would get rid of her in an instant. This was extremely funny and we laughed for some time. I didn’t tell you, she said suddenly, that I had earned a degree out of pride. I am not proud or ashamed of it. Like most things in my life, I am not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it. It will just be hard for you to understand me, if you don’t know that I spent a long time on work like that. When I am cutting a carrot you can think of it, and understand me better.