Isnt it just a matter of degree? We’re all of us pretty much an assemblage of memories.

I know. It’s an uncertain business. I suppose I trust my memory of events largely because of the evidence I have for my ability at memorization. Are they the same? The lines of a poem have no substance other, but the events of history—including your personal history—have no substance at all. Their materiality has vanished without a trace. My experience has been that people with poor memories are just as ready to be right as anyone else.

Your world must be getting a bit crowded by now.

It is. Not everything is welcome. You have to be careful what you let in. But I wouldnt change it. I’ll never escape Plato. Or Kant. Wittgenstein I regard as something of a contemporary. A fellow student. Husserl I fell in love with. He was a mathematician, so I trusted him. He was professor at Freiburg and he took in a young student named Martin Heidegger and was his teacher and his mentor and then the Nazis came and they said that Husserl would have to be dismissed because he was a Jew and Heidegger said why yes, that was only right. And so Husserl cleared out his desk and went home and sat and wept and then he died and Heidegger took over his chair. So the question that we’re left with I suppose is that if human decency does not represent something like the foundation of philosophical inquiry then what is its purpose? Wittgenstein agonized his whole life over the state of his soul. The question never seems to have occurred to Heidegger. How did I get to be the counselor?

I dont know. You might have been a good one.

Probably not. I think that I’d have told people I didnt want to hear about their boring daylives and let’s just cut directly to the dreams.

Do we do that?

Cut to the dreams?

I dont know.

We should have talked more about dreams?

We is not over.

I suppose. But she’s a cunning little bitch. Every other word a lie no doubt. What’s the linguistic connection between devious and deviant? What time is lunch?

Noon I think. Let me ask you this. If you were rejected by this man why couldnt you just get on with your life? You were what? Twelve?

Yes. A twelve year old slut.

That seems unlikely.

I’m just saying that I was a horny girl.

You were sexually active?

No. Of course not. But there was something about myself that I hadnt accepted. Sometimes it takes a somewhat disorienting experience to wrench you from your slumbers.

I take it that there was such an experience.

There was.

Is this something that you would be willing to share?

It will sound trivial.

All right.

It was in the hallway at school between classes.

In high school.

Yes. This boy who was a senior stopped me and asked me to turn around. He was captain of the basketball team and was generally thought to be about the coolest guy in the school. And he had a paper and a ballpoint in his hand and he made this twirling motion with his finger and he said: Let me borrow your back. And this girl was standing there with him watching and I turned around and he put the paper on my back and wrote on it. I dont know what it was. Maybe he just signed it. I dont know. And maybe he knew what he was doing. I mean he could have just used the wall. Or a locker door. But I turned around and he wrote on my back and I closed my eyes. It was enormously sensual. I thought at first that it was just that shivery feeling like someone’s fingers going up your back. But it was more than that. I felt that he was writing something to me. I could feel the girl watching me. She was suddenly curious. She was probably sixteen. When he’d finished he said thanks and I opened my eyes and they were gone down the hall.