The Library - Eighth Scene

“How did you end up here?” she asked No. 5, in a daze, realizing the inappropriate nature of the question before she had the time to call it back. It was no business of hers how these men ended up in the middle of the desert, enacting classic tragedies in the original Greek, and she would have been offended if they questioned her choices.

In fact, she wouldn’t have known how to answer such a question. People always like to believe they have reasons for doing things, and were they to explain themselves, they would gladly volunteer the logic of their circumstances, but that’s all self-delusion. We all make our choices before we even think about them, and fill in the blanks with reasons after the fact in order to explain them to ourselves.

Thankfully society gives us a pass on explaining our emotions, because we’d have a bear of a time shoving those into a logical frame.