"If you think this sort of award is the only way to validate your intelligence—privileging intelligence as a quality above all else—then," he continued, looking out through the window but never quite looking at anything, "you need to shut the fuck up. Because you didn't deserve it. You didn't fucking deserve it. I know life is unfair—so sad—but everything will work out in the end. The universe turns in on itself to amend injustices both large and tiny. You will not amount to anything."
The room was ravaged by the silence that followed. The white noise of traffic was neutral and devastating.
"I speak the truth," he said.
"You don't."
"There is nothing more repugnant than your sense of entitlement. I want you to know that."
How was I supposed to respond to this? A flipped table, a damaged paper lantern, a chipped nail. I can only think in images, and the world is conceived as a series of sense percepts that form an artificial holism, an impression of "experience" accessible to no one else. In this way, I am all alone in the world.
We are all alone, lonely, in the world.
"You are retarded," he said. "You limit yourself by questioning the ontology of everything. It's bad enough that you can't even commit to a belief in the existence of the Real, but you sentimentalise it and make it your own personal, romanticised problem. Your selfishness is grotesque because it is embedded in your grasp of first principles, colouring everything you think and do and say."
I can control everything in this discursive space.
He did backflips across the room and returned to the starting point. He shapeshifted into a carp, gasping for air on the floor. He turned back into a person.
"Discussions about truth should have been done in the last epoch."
"No one knows who is talking and who is replying anymore."
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