I shower.

It’s fairly common on the ward. People tend to neglect things like hygiene.

What else is like hygiene?

I dont know. Has someone been critical of your appearance?

Not that I know of. I know sometimes I look like I left the house in a hurry. I used to enjoy getting dressed up to go dancing. But that was costume.

Make-believe.

Yes.

You would get dressed up for Bobby.

I suppose. Yes.

I’m sorry.

It’s all right. There were times I’d see him looking at me and I would leave the room crying. I knew that I’d never be loved like that again. I just thought that we would always be together. I know you think I should have seen that as more aberrant than I did, but my life is not like yours. My hour. My day. I used to dream about our first time together. I do yet. I wanted to be revered. I wanted to be entered like a cathedral.

Maybe we should talk about something else.

I know.

You’ve snarled a bit at Jung but I dont think we’ve said much about Freud.

We were jung and easily freudened.

What is that?

Nothing. A line from Joyce. I think the case histories are interesting. Of course there’s always something for sale. The dream book is good to the extent that it’s not a novel. I think he has a shaky view of our inner life. Maybe moreso even than Jung. It’s not that complicated. If they’d thought a bit more about biological evolution and spent less time cooking up nutty theories they might have uncovered a few simple truths.

You wouldnt agree that their theories are nevertheless based upon actual observation?

Like astrology.

You’re not serious.

Maybe not. At least Freud doesnt attempt to say what dreams are.

And that’s a good thing.

Yes. Because he doesnt know. Creating a language for nonexistent categories is not a particularly good strategy for those wishing to leave some sort of intellectual legacy. There has to be a metaphor for such enterprises. Some image of theoretical bones whitening in the waste.

Mathematics is subject to no such weathering.

No. When mathematics is gone it will all be gone.

But still…

But still. And yet. Life is hard. I will always love mathematics but I’m a granitehearted skeptic and it may be that my doubts cannot be addressed by logical inquiry. The whereof that one cannot.

Is there a single insight that supports most of modern mathematics?

Oh this is good.

Sorry.

No. It’s not a lame question. It’s just that we dont know the answer. Things like the deeps of cohomology or Cantor’s discontinuum are tainted with the flavor of unguessed worlds. We can see the footprints of algebras whose entire domain is immune to commutation. Matrices whose hatchings cast a shadow upon the floor of their origins and leave there an imprint to which they no longer conform. Homological algebra has come to shape a good deal of modern mathematics. But in the end the world of computation will simply absorb it.