Losing: An Interrogation

INTRLCTR: And you dislike it?

PSajak: Yes.

INTRLCTR: It doesn't feel good?

PSajak: No. Not even for a second.

INTRLCTR: When you take it away?

PSajak: No. I would give it all away. I would give everything away if I could.

INTRLCTR: You're a generous man.

PSajak: I'm not generous. I'm nothing. Everything is contingent, which is as bad as predestination, when you think about it. Absolute and total human freedom, sure, but what does that get you when the world of human thought and action is composed of a nearly infinite series of contact points, each of them subject to pressure from a whole range of different forces at any given moment? Ideological, physical, interpersonal, egotistic, and so on. This is as bad as total anarchy. Absolute freedom, yes, but what does is it come to, is what I'm asking. There's no real decision when you are subject to so many others, and so many other things, that are decided all around you, constantly.

INTRLCTR: But there is salvation on the smallest human scale, right? If only by reconciling with ourselves these forces. Surrender can become a kind of victory, as long we're willing to concede that the battle was lost before we ever had a chance.

PSajak: Typical bourgeois attitude. We never had a chance, so why be sore about it? Fuck you. You don't know the shit I've seen, the loss I've witnessed. The human soul sifting through the sieve of a body too caught up in the vacillations of chance to notice its own depletion.

INTRLCTR: That was very poetic.

PSajak: You don't know the shit I've seen.

INTRLCTR: Well, you are syndicated.

PSajak: The syndicate ...