The Same

You should never learn from your mistakes, W. and I agree. It's our operating principle. If we lived them over again, would our lives be any different? Not one bit! The same, they'd be exactly the same, and that's our strength, W. says. We are reliable in our idiocy.

Is that why thinkers – real thinkers – are attracted to us? They want to be amused, no doubt, and we are amusing, for a while at least. We have a kind of charm. We make them laugh, our thinkers, who are often lost in melancholy. We lighten their souls.

But we always go too far in our inanity. We alienate them, our thinker-friends, sending them into a new kind of melancholy. They walk away, shaking their heads. What happened when we rushed into the rooms of one of our thinkers, pulling up his bedclothes in order to sleep like a thinker? What when we pulled on his tee-shirts over ours in order to dress like a thinker? He was appalled, of course. He shook his head. We'd invaded his thought-cell, and for what? We'd breached the outer doors of his thought-sanctum, and then what did we do? We can't control ourselves, W. says. It's grotesque.