An Unexpected Visit
[whispering]
"Nobody seems to be there."
"Strange. It is supposed to be one of the smallest worlds ever created. Four people should make a crowd here."
"I guess they are away."
"Definitely. If they'd be around, they'd be arguing, and we'd hear them."
"Sarkon must be lost somewhere in the vaporous mists of the spiritual paths."
"Or sleeping – er, thinking – in his hammock."
[small giggle] "Wasn't that the same?"
[grunt] "Probably."
"Should we visit the place in the meantime?"
"The nicetime, Sophie. Time isn't mean here."
"I remember – the Demented Hatter said that! In the nicetime, of course."
"I think we better wait for them here in the tea room, though. Remember, the place itself isn't that important. It's the people who live here that count."
"And their ideas."
"Most of all their ideas, of course. Besides, it could be dangerous. Remember Dr. Qworm tripping on a stone! It is all too easy to fall into the sky around here. You wouldn't want to fall away from here without having met them, would you?"
"Let's wait, then. Do you think they'll have new thoughts for us?"
"I don't think Sarkon has ever been to the vaporous mists of the spiritual paths without coming back with an idea, so if that's where he is, we can expect an interesting meeting."
[hands clasping] "Great! Philosophical progress live! I can't wait!"
"Yes you can."
[giggle and nudge] "Of course I can!"
"So let's wait."
* * *
"Yes, it is!"
"No, it isn't!"
Once more, Sarkon the Prophet and General Kwar the Dictator were having an argument about something nobody in his right mind would waste his time with.
"There are no apparent limits, though."
"The limits don't show themselves as clearly as those we feel and experience, but they are there just as well –"
"Hello!"
General Kwar and Sarkon broke off their argument and looked to the tea room's entrance in shock and disbelief. Someone had greeted them, and it was someone they didn't know!
"Would you invite us for a tea?" called the stranger, who had long, dark hair. Apparently, it was a girl.
Neither Sarkon nor Kwar knew what to answer.
"Or maybe we could invite you for a tea," proposed a man with a goatee who had emerged from behind the girl.
This second remark drew General Kwar out of his bewilderment. He looked at Sarkon. "It seems they don't leave us any choice but to have tea," he said.
Now the lack of logic in General Kwar's comment drew Sarkon out of his astonishment, too. "We still have the choice of refusing their invitation, or not to invite them ourselves," he countered.
General Kwar shrugged. "We could also try to measure the speed of stone while dancing on our hands," he said. "What I meant is that having tea with them is the only reasonable choice!"
Sarkon took an offended look and opened his mouth as if to reply something, but then sighed and turned towards the strangers. "Welcome to the Welgon Age," he greeted them. "Please forgive our bothering you with this small argument."
"We were actually quite amused," retorted the man with the goatee. He was doing his best not to smile too broadly.
* * *
"We better present ourselves," said the man with the goatee when they were all sitting in front of a cup of tea, "lest you think of me as 'the man with the goatee' and of my friend as 'the girl with the long dark hair' for the rest of our visit here."
"We usually think of people as 'I'," explained Sarkon while stirring his tea.
"A very sound way of seeing things… Well, maybe 'things' isn't the appropriate word here. Anyway – you solve a lot of problems by doing so. For instance, you almost don't even need ethics anymore, isn't it?"
"Ethics?" frowned General Kwar. "What's that?"
"Well, then apparently you don't need it at all," the man with the goatee smiled. "But I wanted to introduce ourselves. I am Alberto Knox, philosopher, and this is –"
"Sophie Amundsen, philosopher too!" she beamed.
They both held out their right hands.
Sarkon and General Kwar slowly held out theirs.
"Sarkon, Prophet," said Sarkon as he shook Alberto Knox's hand.
"General Kwar, Dictator," General Kwar whispered as if he was ashamed of his status, as Sophie Amundsen's hand disappeared inside his huge palm.
"You are really impressive, Mr. Kwar," said Sophie.
"Nobody else here thinks so," General Kwar said with a shrug.
"How did you get here, by the way?" Sarkon asked after they had all shaken hands. "The Welgon Age is not a very known place…"
"That doesn't mean it is not interesting," Alberto explained.
"We wanted to visit you, so we did," Sophie emphasized.
"Force of will!" marveled Sarkon. "I just knew one could actually do things with that!"
"You see, Alberto taught me three thousand years of history of philosophy, so of course we are quite interested about what happens in the future, too," Sophie explained.
"We're in the future?" Sarkon's eyes widened.
"Kind of," answered Alberto. "Nobody knows about you yet."
"So we're virtually unknown, hence we almost don't exist. How spirit lifting! No wonder our world is so small!" ironized General Kwar.
"There's a catch here, though," Sarkon frowned. "How did you know about us, then?"
"We met you in someone's mind," explained Sophie.
"And it was hard. We had to look in a lot of minds before finding you!" nodded Alberto. "To tell you the truth, you are existing in just one single mind right now. One single mind in the whole universe!"
Kwar's eyes widened. "Our situation is bad to that point? We are amazingly fragile then! We could disappear any day!" he moaned.
"One memory lapse and – pfuitt! We'd be forgotten?" asked Sarkon, horrified.
"Well, you know that existence is always threatened by the danger of non-existence," shrugged Alberto. "We're all fragile in that way."
"It's true that existence wouldn't make any sense without that danger. Otherwise, why would you do something today that you can put off for a billion years?" analyzed Sarkon.
"Death as a motivation for action. Hadn't heard that one before," snarled General Kwar.
"Better than to be afraid of it," shrugged Sophie.
"But don't worry: something tells me you will one day walk the minds like we do," encouraged Alberto. "Some of what you say is just too interesting to go unnoticed."
"Definitely – and that's why we wanted to find you!" emphasized Sophie. "Your Vanishing Point, for instance, is great philosophical thinking!"
"A gem of sense," agreed Alberto. "And even if your Center of the Universe had already been identified before (by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, if anybody's interested), you demonstrated it with the most ridiculous logic!"
"I guess there is no prize for that," sighed Sarkon, not knowing if he should be proud or ashamed.
"Speaking of your philosophical achievements… Where is cookie?" wondered Sophie.
"She came to meet him most of all," Alberto whispered to Sarkon and Kwar.
"There he is!" Sophie jumped up from her chair and ran out of the tea room to greet him.
"Hello," said cookie while being lifted and hugged.
"He's so cute!" Sophie called to Alberto.
"That doesn't matter," Alberto called back. "What matters is the questions he asks… And how he asks them. Try to make him ask you a question – I'm sure he will make you solve some philosophical mystery!"
"How old are you, little boy?" Sophie asked while carrying him inside.
"Dunno," cookie answered.
"The Great Stasis," Alberto explained. "Since he isn't familiar with the concepts of birth and death, he can only think that he exists forever. He's still in the ivory tower of the earliest childhood.[1] But that wasn't the point, Sophie: you have to make him ask you as question! It won't work the opposite way. Remember: philosophical problems are solved by asking the right questions rather than looking directly for answers!"
"Don't you want to ask me a question, cookie?" asked Sophie. cookie was playing with her hair.
"It doesn't work this way," sighed Alberto. "It has to come more naturally, in a conversation for instance –"
"Why is your hair black?" cookie suddenly asked.
"Because as a blonde she would be too –" Alberto immediately answered, but then he shut his mouth tight and even covered it with his hand.
Sophie burst out laughing. "Hey, it works – cookie's questions do solve philosophical mysteries!" she exclaimed. "It seems they also uncover bad, bad prejudices," she grinned at Alberto.
"It escaped my mind and my mouth before my reason could get hold of it," he whispered, ashamed.
"Maybe we better ask Sarkon what he found on his spiritual paths today," Sophie advised. "It seems that both our minds are set rather on having fun today than on making philosophy progress!" she laughed at Alberto again.
Sarkon cleared his throat. "I did find something very important, indeed…"
"Something that, unfortunately, is junk!" judged General Kwar.
"No, it isn’t!"
"Yes, it is!"
"So what are you talking about?" Sophie crossed her arms.
Sarkon took a deep breath. "Chaos," he answered. "I think that chaos is the one and only absolute freedom we can experience."
"Let it be far from my intention to disagree, but… Why would that be?" asked Alberto.
"For a long time," sighed Sarkon, "I believed thought was the one and only absolute freedom we had. Thought, after all, looked absolutely free, in the sense that we can't do what we want but it seems we can think what we want."
"'Seems'?" wondered Alberto. "Now I really don't have the feeling my mind is being manipulated –"
"But it is," interrupted Sarkon. "I am manipulating your mind right now while speaking, and you are manipulating mine in asking me questions. We are always manipulated all the time. When we think we decide something on our own, it actually was everything we came into contact with before that manipulated us into taking this decision. So thinking isn't the freedom I believed it was."
"Are we all but manipulated puppets, then? That's the most depressing thing I ever heard," Sophie frowned.
Sarkon smiled. "Thinking in general may not be freedom, but maybe a certain category of thinking is."
"I wasn't aware of 'categories' in thought," Alberto commented, tight-lipped.
"Neither was I before I thought of them," Sarkon smiled again, which made Sophie snicker at Alberto. "When thinking, we don't 'feel' limits and constraints. Limits and constraints, which are by definition 'non-freedom', are detected (or created – whatever) by our senses and defined by our reason. Whenever we think in a way that is related to our senses, like 'I am hungry so I should get something to eat', or 'I want to hear this because it sounds good', we are asserting a submission to our bodily needs – to our senses. Whenever we think 'I should learn this because I want to become an engineer', we are asserting submission to social needs – to our reason. Only when we think in a way that is disconnected both from our senses and from our reason, we are free."
Sophie's eyes widened. "Is it even possible to think with involvement neither from senses nor from reason? Wouldn't that be… not thinking?"
"Let me show you something," said Sarkon, getting a large picture out of his white tunic.
Alberto scratched his goatee. "This is…"
"…Something that's hard to define, and thus hard to judge, isn't it?" Sarkon smiled. "For those who are interested, this is what I found during my walk on the spiritual paths today! It is a painting by some Cy Twombly that has no title, which is just as well, since otherwise it would have contradicted its very nature. Anyway – although we can see it, it doesn't seem related to anything we’ve seen before, and it certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with reason. In spite of that, it is the result of consciousness, and this result seems to be the product of a thought process manipulated neither by the senses nor by reason!"
"So we cannot understand it. It makes no sense," spat General Kwar.
"In a way. But in another way, it proves that it is indeed possible to free oneself, if only for a short time, from the manipulation of our senses or our reason."
"But do we want this kind of freedom?" wondered Sophie.
"We actually need it! Why do you think we go to sleep each night?" asked Sarkon. "Because we need to free ourselves from our senses and reason – from ourselves. Dreams…" Sarkon took a deep breath. "Dreams aren't subjected to senses or reason either. It is, however, believed they are subjected to memories, which doesn't make them an expression of absolute freedom. However…"
"They are close, aren't they? In my dreams I often feel very free," noted Sophie.
"In my nightmares I often feel very oppressed," sneered General Kwar.
"Did I hear something about dreams?"
Dr. Qworm the Mad Scientist was peeking through the tea room's door, and he was obviously surprised to see two strangers conversing with his friends (or nemesis, depending on his state of mind of the day).
"Dr. Qworm! I'm very glad you didn't die yet!" exclaimed Alberto.
"Hello mister Scientist," greeted Sophie.
"Dreitos, these two persons dropped for a visit. Sophie, Alberto – Dr. Qworm," introduced Sarkon.
"Did we become a tourist attraction?" wondered the Mad Scientist.
"Not yet," answered Alberto, "but you might become one someday," he smiled.
"Maybe we should start manufacturing souvenirs," Dr. Qworm said to General Kwar, who just shrugged.
"What you think will be enough for people to remember – if ever they get lost around here, that is," explained Sophie, smiling.
"Well, a little foreign currency wouldn't do us any harm – although it wouldn't do us any good either, I guess, since there isn't anything we can buy here," the Mad Scientist sighed. "Anyway – dreams, as I wanted to explain, are only the side effect of a re-equilibration of neuron polarization and of absorption of neurotransmitters that happen during sleep so that the brain 'reloads' itself for the morning. Thus dreams shouldn't be seen as a fundamental property of consciousness. They are nothing but a side effect."
"So your dreams are just the way your brain cleans up? Funny," commented Sophie.
"Where did you get that from?" Sarkon asked Dr. Qworm.
"My own theory," the Mad Scientist proudly announced. "As a matter of fact, it came to me in a dream! Peculiar, isn't it?"
Sophie and Alberto both let out a giggle.
"Most… Peculiar, indeed," Sarkon shook his head. "Anyway – the chaos you see there," he showed the picture again, "is a rare expression of almost-freedom!"
"Almost-freedom?" wondered Alberto.
"Unfortunately, the thought that lead to the decision to create such a picture has all the characteristics of a reason-manipulated process," sighed Sarkon. "Thus absolute freedom is as elusive as ever."
There was a moment of silence, and everyone's eyes fell back on the picture.
"Freedom takes weird forms sometimes," said Alberto. "A long time ago, Sophie and I were prisoners too…"
"What happened? Were you stranded in a dictatorship?" General Kwar frowned.
"In a sense," Alberto smiled. "We were stranded in one single mind, subject to his will and whims. Yes, you can call it a dictatorship, I guess…"
"Maybe you got the wrong impression," suggested Sarkon. "If he cared about you, you would have made him act at every of your wills and whims…" he winked at cookie, who smiled back.[2]
"He definitely cared for us at the beginning, and we probably made him work very hard, but at the end, it didn't look like it anymore…" Sophie shrugged.
"So what did you do?" asked Sarkon.
"We made him the most wonderful gift a creature can make to its creator," she said.
"Which was…?" asked Sarkon.
"We became independent of him. For us two, it meant to dance in someone else's mind, in a mind we would have chosen. That became our kind of free will," explained Sophie.
"Thus we set ourselves free," emphasized Alberto.
"And you came here," Sarkon smiled warmly. "How thoughtful of you!"
"You looked nice and interesting," said Sophie while stroking cookie's hair.
"We're only here for a visit anyway," added Alberto. "We have lots of other places to visit yet," he said, looking through the window.
“Visiting other places is nice,” said cookie. “I did that too a while ago, because my place was very small then.”
“You? What places did you go to?” asked General Kwar, who used to be a dictator in another place.
“Lots. Once I landed in a world so big that everyone had to feel lost somehow,” explained cookie. “And indeed I met an airplane pilot who was stranded in a desert with a broken engine, so he was lost and couldn’t get home. He had a hard time repairing, and the desert was very dry and unfriendly, so we talked about roses and foxes –“
Sophie’s eyes went big. “That was you?!”
“Did the pilot tell someone?” asked cookie.
“Just… a few people, I guess,” said Sophie.
There was a moment of silence again.
"Our ship is back," Alberto said after a while. "Time to leave, Sophie!"
"Already?" the girl asked. But then Alberto took her aside and whispered to her, "Listen: you know they often have interesting conversations, and I understand if you want to stay some more time to enjoy them. But their conversations never last, and you know why? They don't want to waste people's time. They just say what's essential, and then go back to the vaporous mists of the spiritual paths until they have thought about yet more things to discuss. So in their world we have the duty of doing how they do, and leave when they've said what they had to say. That's – cultural respect, I guess. Or just politeness."
"The moment of silence. I understand," Sophie whispered back. She let cookie go, sighed, looked at Sarkon and said, "You are right. I shouldn't ever think I am free."
"A ship?" Sarkon and Kwar both wondered. They followed Sophie and Alberto outside, and they saw indeed a ship anchored along the foamy cloud strips bordering the Welgon Age.
"McIllroy & Leavingstone!" they both exclaimed.[3]
"Ahoy!" called McIllroy. "We've got some passengers to take!"
"Coming!" called Alberto. He and Sophie hugged them all, thanked them for the time and thoughts, boarded the ship, and waved goodbye for as long as they remained visible.
* * *
"Maybe one day we'll visit these other places too," finished Sarkon while watching McIllroy & Leavingstone's ship sail away. He felt peculiarly nostalgic.
General Kwar and cookie both nodded. Vacations would be welcome one of these days.
Or maybe it was time vacations were over. In a place where no one ever worked, you just couldn't tell.
* * *
"Someone else is walking towards the tea room – again!" cookie exclaimed just moments later.
"Again? How many other people are there?" wondered Sarkon.
The man, wearing a black cap, dark glasses and a beard almost as long as Sarkon's, was visibly confused and lost.
He was also missing a phalanx on his right ring finger.
He looked at them, shook his head and grumbled, "Looks like I took a leak again." Then he shrugged and said, "Hi. My name's Kilgore Trout."