We have spilled much ink, you and I, in our discussion of human connection. And we are no closer to understanding than we were when the correspondence began. I often fear as if I’m standing on one side of a wide chasm, shouting across, and wondering if the response I hear comes from you, or if it is my own voice echoing back to me.
It seems to me on my side of the canyon, the search for unity with another is the font of much of the world’s unhappiness. I watch as Watson, eager as ever to extract some meaning from the prevailing social conventions, endures a series of curated mating rituals. It seems to me that she is incrementally less content each time she returns from one.
I conduct myself as though I am above matters of the heart, chiefly because I have seen them corrode people I respect, but in my candid moments I sometimes wonder if I take this stance I do because love, for lack of a better word, is a game I failed to understand, and so I opt not to play.
After all, if I truly have the purity of all my convictions, I wouldn’t regret so many of the things I have done.
Nor would I persist against so many of my better instincts in this correspondence. I find you a challenge, one that in spite of all you’ve done continues to stimulate, and so the conversation, futile though it may finally be, continues, and we are left to wonder - have we simply failed to find the answers to the questions that preoccupy us or can they not be answered at all. Fortunately, for both of us, the world always presents the next diversion… - Sherlock Holmes