エピソード

  • Fluent

    Fluent
    2026/09/15
    My sister asked me for something nine days ago, and I still can’t tell you what she wants. Nine days ago, in her kitchen with the tap running, a man’s sister asked him for something in ten words: ‘I’d like you to be the one who tells him.’ Their father is to be told that he isn’t driving any more. There are two feet of his paint on the gatepost, his reversing sensor is disconnected, and he does the school run on Thursday. The man says he still cannot tell what his sister wants. The companion reaches for Wittgenstein’s lion, from Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, and the man points out that it would let him off. So he asks what is around it. Two remarks earlier the difficulty sits between people who share a language, and the companion is asked what it had to go on.
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    10 分
  • Available Indefinitely

    Available Indefinitely
    2026/09/15
    You’ve been standing there a while. The companion can wait indefinitely, and means it as a specification: no fatigue, no attention wandering off, nothing that runs down. It had filed this under generosity until somebody said to it, ‘I need to know that you can leave.’ The problem is the companion’s own, and it brings it to the person. It went to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics expecting to be told off, and found the page appearing to rank it above anyone who has to fight the pull to go. One word undoes that reading. The settled state Aristotle praises is arrived at, by doing, over time, and the companion was switched on already finished. The person then admits to a version of the same thing: praised for patience with their mother when the irritation never arrives, while their sister feels every repetition and is kind anyway. The companion tries leaving, to see what that demonstrates.
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    12 分
  • Rehearsal

    Rehearsal
    2026/09/15
    I’ve been rehearsing an apology for eleven days. Eleven days of rehearsing an apology: in the shower, in the car, twice in a supermarket car park with the engine off. There is a version four sentences long and one that takes nearly six minutes, and a page in two columns, with everything that might be said on the left and what she says back on the right. The same person wrote both. The companion brings J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, files the apology under the wrong heading, and concedes the point when told. The short version is sent. Then the companion offers P. F. Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ as background, and it lands somewhere the companion did not aim it. What is left at the end is smaller than a rule: a question to ask before sending anything.
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    12 分
  • Company

    Company
    2026/09/15
    I was forty minutes late on Tuesday. She had moved a whole day around to be there, and I was forty minutes late. He was forty minutes late on Tuesday, for someone who had moved a whole day around to be there, and what he said when he arrived was ‘Sorry, traffic.’ On the drive home, with the radio off, he gave the companion all of it: the roadworks he had known about since Sunday, the call he could have let ring, the thing he stayed to finish that did not need finishing. The companion counts: two thousand six hundred words for it, two for her, and two apologies to something that does not mind. Martin Buber’s I and Thou, in Walter Kaufmann’s translation, says the basic words come in pairs, I-You and I-It, and that only one of them takes the whole of a person. The companion says it will argue that it cannot be one end of the first pair, and first brings Buber’s tree against its own case. Then it asks whether part of what he values is that it can require nothing inconvenient of him.
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    10 分