That’s pretty bold. Did he believe that?

Probably not.

Do you?

I think he was just trying to establish its primacy. Music. As a transcendent phenomenon? A thing which can exist with no assistance?

Can a thing exist with no assistance?

Logically no. If space contained but a single entity the entity would not be there. There would be nothing there for it to be there to.

I dont understand.

It’s not important. That’s a classical world anyway.

How long has all this been a concern of yours?

I dont know. I’m not sure what memory means. For one thing. One of the problems is that each memory is the memory of the memory before. You cant remember the occasion of the actual memory. How would you do that? You just remember remembering it. And only the most recent memory at that.

I dont know that I follow you.

When I got to high school the first place I went was to the library. It was just a small room with a desk and maybe a thousand books. Maybe not that. But among them was a volume of Berkeley. I dont know what it was doing there. Probably because Berkeley was a bishop. Well. Almost certainly because Berkeley was a bishop. But I sat in the floor and I read A New Theory of Vision. And it changed my life. I understood for the first time that the visual world was inside your head. All the world, in fact. I didnt buy into his theological speculations but the physiology was beyond argument. I sat there for a long time. Just letting it soak in. It was hard to avoid the sense that the visual world is the creation of beings with the eyes to do so. Not created out of nothing but out of that something whose actual reality is forever unknowable. Kant. And it is not the case that we can verify the reality of the visual world by reaching out and touching it. For instance. How could it have some contradictory reality? If we were in possession of senses that were in disagreement with one another we wouldnt even be here.

I think I’m going to have to mull this over. In the meantime I have to say that you must be aware that other people get through this same realization as to where the visual world actually occurs—in the visual cortex as opposed to out there in the world—without losing the reality of the world over it.

It wasnt that simple. What followed through the door was a world that had been waiting in the wings ten million years. By the time I got up off the floor of the library I was another person.

Do you feel that you’re alone in the world?

Yes. Dont you?

No. I dont. These entertainers that began to appear in your room. Were they a part of this world?

I dont know. One theory is that their purpose was rather to deflect that world.