“Then why learn the story he was enacting?”
“Again, why not learn it?”
Ishmael shook his head. “I don’t care to proceed on that basis. The fact that I can’t give you reasons for not learning something doesn’t supply me with a reason for teaching it.”
He was clearly in a bad mood. I couldn’t blame him, but I couldn’t much sympathize either, since it was he who had insisted on having it this way.
He said: “Is it just a matter of curiosity for you?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. You said in the beginning that two stories have been enacted here. I now know one of them. It seems natural that I’d want to know the other one.”
“Natural …” he said, as if it wasn’t a word he much liked. “I wish you could come up with something that has a bit more heft. Something that would give me the feeling I wasn’t the only one here who was supposed to be using his brain.”
“I’m afraid I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“I know you don’t, and that’s what irks me. You’ve become a passive listener here, turning your brain off when you sit down and turning it on when you get up to leave.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Then tell me why it isn’t just a waste of time for you to learn a story that is now all but extinguished.”
“Well, I don’t consider it a waste of time.”
“That’s not good enough. The fact that something is not a waste of time does not inspire me to do it.”
I shrugged helplessly.
He shook his head, totally disgusted. “You really do think that learning this would be pointless. That’s obvious.”
“It’s not obvious to me.”
“Then you think it has a point?”
“Well … yes.”
“What point?”
“God … I want to learn it, that’s the point.”
“No. I won’t proceed on that basis. I want to proceed, but not if all I’m doing is satisfying your curiosity. Go away and come back when you can give me some authentic reason for going on.”
“What would an authentic reason sound like? Give me an example.”
“All right. Why bother to learn what story is being enacted here by the people of your own culture?”
“Because enacting that story is destroying the world.”
“True. But why bother learning it?”
“Because that’s obviously something that should be known.”
“Known by whom?”
“By everyone.”
“Why? That’s what I keep coming back to. Why, why, why? Why should your people know what story they’re enacting as they destroy the world?”
“So they can stop enacting it. So they can see that they’re not just blundering as they do what they do. So they can see that they’re involved in a megalomaniac fantasy—a fantasy as insane as the Thousand Year Reich.”