He said that there was actually one writing project that if carried out successfully would be enough to justify anyone’s life. That would be a convincing essay against violence, against participating in official violence, ever. He had the noumenal form of the essay.

The text was always pallid and weak compared to what he knew and felt, which was the proof that he lacked the genius to externalize himself on this issue.

I said: One thing about yourself that I think you don’t appreciate is the complexity of why people tend to accept things you lay out for them as good ideas. Don’t get mad, but in a way your lifework could be described as getting people to do things you regard as improvements, better for them. You have great powers of getting people to do things the way you want. Only partly is that because the things you come up with are sensible in themselves. The rest of it has to do with something benign about you, unusually so. You seem good. You seem unselfish. Even people who are really at loggerheads with you see it, although it may drive them even crazier against you when they do. Also you look counter to what you are, since you look more like an unemployed wrestler than anything else, which incidentally adds to your power. What you are operates cross-culturally, for some unknown reason. I may be trying to say that possibly the plenary is less important in a structural way than you think, and that it should sink or swim but you should hold back from using your powers to try to get it reinstated. What I want to feel is that you’ve divorced yourself from it.

This is as I reconstruct it. By the end of it I was confused about what, really, I was trying to say, other than quite obviously declaring appreciation tantamount to the most abject love.

His reaction to this was to say Light from the caves! This was a standby he used to greet solecisms or cant.

I was overwhelmed with the desire to apologize, which I suppressed.