Reflection on a Sour Dialogue:

What at first appeared to be a genial and well-intentioned dialogue between two equals proved to have concealed a darker undercurrent of manipulation, flattery, deceit, and snide dismissal. It was hard to shake the creeping feeling that my interlocutor's polite acknowledgement of every point, his thin veneer of interest and pleasant invitation to continue down a path he'd chosen for us, coupled with his passive patience when I would not go there, barely holding back the impulse to direct us down another path, was nothing but a mask of gratitude behind which lay a calculating intellect that cherry-picked those arguments of mine which it could turn in its own favour, subtly ignoring all the rest, as if a single "thanks" sufficed to clear them from the table.

All of these techniques, familiar to me from years of studying debate and rhetoric, are innocent enough when they are used in the pursuit of common goods, the symptom of this venture being the attainment of, if not conclusive breakthrough, then a series of compassionate reactions wherein both debaters are transformed, their friendship flourishing through mutual, sincere appraisal of the other's brilliance. It would seem Platonic and idealized, except that such encounters constitute the very lifeblood of my enterprise, the very Milk of Life that keeps me going, and I fear that if a single year should pass without such meetings I would die upon the onset of the following. I do not know if this false friend and flatterer had ever had such conversations; all I know is that *I* have, and that alone suffices to impel me to pursue them to the utter and complete exclusion of these passively aggressive, wordy spats.

At any rate, I cannot bring myself to feel much shame at my own lack of wonder at his arguments, as though I were some hypocrite for failing to appraise him as the genius I wished him to identify in me. In fact, his early flattery was more than adequate to stroke my pride, though thankfully I'm cautious not to let that pride become entranced at the expense of rigour. I simply could not level with him as an equal, for the more translucent that his front appeared the less I cared for that repugnant, lurid glow I saw beneath it, and, the more I had to justify the seeming contradictions in my worldview, like a patient in a mental hospital, the more defiant and assertive did my views become. My interlocutor's refusal to acknowledge any ground of Good or Evil that might lie beyond the narrow confines of his cozy, therapeutic outlook only underscored the breadth and depth of my opinion, the latter being not mine own exclusively but one I shared with countless others who were active in the World, not just the Mind.

**[({R.G.)}]**


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