We flee from the truth because the truth is notoriously unkind. The truth is so unkind, so very unkind. It is no friend to anyone. None of us have any great fondness for the truth, would you not agree? Shall we wail together about the unkindness of the truth, shall we wail out loud and let our brittle voices be carried away by the pitiless wind?

To pass the time I ask myself riddles – “I’m as hot as a hare, as blind as a bat, as dry as a bone, as red as a beet and as mad as a Hatter – what am I?” It is a good riddle – one of the very best – but I already know the answer. I know the answer and therefore I can no longer get any satisfaction from repeating it. Not in the way that you can with a decent riddle that you’ve never heard before. I know them all at this stage, however. I know them all and so the game has become terribly, terribly stale.

We’re not so different, you and I. We’re not so very different at all, not matter what you might think. We’ve both spent our lives fleeing from the truth and although we might have ended up in different places, under different circumstances, it still comes down to the same thing, does it not? It always comes down to the same thing in the end, I’m afraid. Wherever you might run, it always ends up terminating in the same place. Always the same place. And how tediously familiar that place is! How loathsomely familiar! You turn away, repelled and appalled by the bitterness you hear in my voice. You don’t wish to know what I have to say, and I can’t blame you for that. No one can blame you for that…

There is nothing remotely palatable about the message I bear. Nothing convivial – nothing whimsical or light-hearted. I choke on the words as I utter them – they stick in my craw but i have to get them out if I can, one way or another. I have to cough them out, as painful as that might be. We’ve run as far as we can, you and I – we’ve found our way at last to the Grand Impasse that was always waiting for us. There’s no way around it and there’s no way through it. It’s the end of the road. It’s the end of all roads. And where else did you think this path was going to lead you, after all? It’s easy enough to lie to oneself when one is in the flush of youth, and when one has made sure to surround oneself with others equally determined to lie their heads off at every opportunity. We’ve all been there, you see. We’ve all been there…

I look back on those days with great nostalgia, as you might imagine. They were glorious days, wonderful days – days that can never be repeated. I don’t really know what I thought I was doing of course; I always had some kind of ridiculous half-baked notion in my head – nothing that would have ever withstood critical analysis, naturally. It’s easy to lie to oneself when one is young and surrounded by others keen on doing exactly the same as you are, as I have said. When you get to my stage of life you will find that lying doesn’t come quite so easily. I still do it of course, but I have to work at it harder. I have to put the effort in, and I no longer have the energy for that. My voice is cracked, hollow and sepulchral and the lies that issue forth from my mouth are no longer as convincing as they once were. In point of fact, they’re not convincing at all. My mouth is full of dust that I can’t spit out, the dust of ancient lies that have long since lost the glamour that once held me in thrall…

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