That idiot, Schopenhauer

Every great human being has said or done something really stupid. There’s Hannibal Lector, who says to agent Starling, “I traveled half the world just to see you jogging.” The character is fictional, I know. But who knows if the ones we only read of, like Socrates, Seneca, didn’t they acquire through the ages a level of mysticism and allegoric qualities to it? This guy eats people for fun and here he is like a cheerleader stalking a grown woman with a career set on pursuing him and bringing him to justice. Talk about a tragic choice! Traveling around the world just to see her jog, while I, on the contrary, would have said: “Look, bitch, meet me in front of Virgin Records on 14th street at six. If you’re not there in twenty minutes, I’m out!” Turn her into your slave as a deserved punishment for a woman who seeks to imprison me for the rest of my life, deprive me of my freedom. “Now, I will deprive you of yours in a much more comfortable way” he’d say. Enslave her for a few weeks, give her proper food, light, and clean water and pure air, restrained somehow. She’d love you in the end, and given your criminal standards this will only go down as rape and illegal imprisonment. Either way, even if you’re found innocent because some powerful jerks want that slut Starling tied upside down, blowing them off, and laid it easy on that charge, you’re still going to the gas chamber.
Conversations I had, people I often talk after months and even years I didn’t call, and tease just the same.
I remember once when I was with Elaine while she awaited the arrival of her roommate and lover, Axle. Thinking back now, I had arrived late for our encounter having decided to go to the movies with my ex. She had had the decency to accept my invitation for a walk when I showed up at the other side of the glass in her bedroom’s window two and a half hours late. “Sorry, princess” I said with a wicked gesture of cynicism.
-You’re out of yourself, again!” –she said, always coming up with her own metaphors. By being out of me, she meant that I was insane in a very healthy way. She’d blend in with any crowd, and go out of herself plenty of times. This time she walked with me and I had the first cigarette of that day, and we ended up both our road and our conversation. So I slowly tighten my hold around her with my hands drawing her nearer; she was breathing heavily. We breathed in, and exhaled almost the same air, and I kissed her goodbye.
I called her from a public phone in the train station. After the initial what’s up, I said, “No, I was just thinking…”
“Thinking, of what?”
I heard the approaching rumbling train in the distance.
“You’re going to sleep with him tonight, aren’t you?” I told her, with the last part of the sentence fractured, choked in pride, enraged. Always honest, she hesitated a second and then firmly admitted: “Well, yes, probably.” Then the train crossing the station on the express track didn’t allow me to hear what she said next but to me that was enough.
I calmly waited for the train to slow down, took out my token, and said to her, a little as if I were spelling the sentence to her, “Well, then. When he’s goes in you just bear in mind that I’d be deep inside someone else too.”
“You asshole,” she bitterly spitted back at me on the phone. I smiled and waited for her to hang up. Then I thought of the departing train: I could have been in it. “Oh, well,” I thought to myself, as if I were recounting the whole ordeal, “there will always be another train.” Nothing happens simultaneously, not the way I conceive this thought and the way in which I deliver it, through the rigid filter of reason. The time it takes to be read aloud or in a quiet room, if read at all. It is as probable to be read nowadays as to finding love and fortune; but it’s fortunate that at least these words aren’t kept in aspiring privacy. They are now like open windows to the landscapes that will unfold, the fog in fall covering the lake and the copious tentacles, sprouts of vegetable rupturing through the decayed statues carved in stone.