"I’m so tired." The old man dropped to the ground in front of the step, hugging his knees to his chest and looking out over the valley.

"Not surprising. You were so focused for so long on such a tiny, tiny view of the world."

"And for what?"

"Perhaps you had to do it that way to get it out of your system."

"But... but..."

"Can you not see that you let your mind, your extreme, focused clever mind become a tool of an entire system of thought?"

"But even now, I cannot see how I had a choice, ever. Even as a child."

"True enough. Caught in the flood-tide of wrong thinking, how few adults can swim against it. And certainly it is all the harder for children."

The old man had tears in his vast, drooping eys. He looked away from the valley, directly at Lao-Tze. "To come from that, heaped with every honor that world could give, to awake from such a grandiose dream and see it for the nightmare that it was..."

"No."

"No?"

"Neither dream nor nightmare, nor not dream nor not nightmare. Here, here's a story for you. A man went to a nude beach and got a terrible sunburn all over. Back home he tried to make love to his girl friend but his dick started burning something awful. He rushed into the kitchen, poured a glass of milk and stuck it in. His girl friend came in, took one look, and said, 'I always wondered how men reload that thing.'"

The old man stood shakily. "Words, old man. You do not have Hiroshima and Nagasaki on your conscience. Your little word games are an insult to the million screaming souls that fill my world since I stopped breathing."