Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

I was still sitting there, too unsure of myself to say anything, when Nicolas kissed me.'Let's go to bed,' he said softly.

Maybe we do go home, finally.

Despair is so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannekin in the window. It could be dispelled by the lights surrounding a tower. It would be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again. Meaningless, I almost said, aloud.

We are the things that others fear,' I said. 'Remember that.

To be human, that's what most of us long for. It is the human which has become myth to us.

Finally those you love are simply ... Those you love.

I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.

And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.

I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all.'But that's just it,' I said, 'we don't make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing.' I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.'Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over!' I shouted at Nicolas, who was sitting back on the bed, nodding and drinking his wine out of a flagon. 'We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witness to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!