“There’s a chance,” I said, “that the world’s lost its mind.”
“There’s a chance,” said he, “you’ve lost yours.”
“I don’t doubt,” I smiled, “but that’s beside the point. Sane until proven insane, let’s say. The question of my sanity has to be discussed in the light of the sanity of my environment.”
“Rubbish. If you’re insane you can’t judge whether or not something is insane.”
“I might suggest,” I said, “if I were in a more playful mood, that like knows like, that an insane man is the one who would best recognize insanity, but that’s not the tact I wish to take. My point, if I have one, is that that if I am insane, I am driven insane, that there are different types of insanity. I would, for the sake of argument, suggest I am mad, you see?”
“Polemics,” he huffed.
“No, this is important. The madman and the insane man may seem similar—bottom line, perhaps they are—but the root causes are most violently opposed. The madman is mad at something, at a real reality. The insane is the unmoored. I am mad, if I am mad, that the world is insane, is unmoored from the real world.”
He laughed. “I think I’ve caught you there. How can the world be unmoored from itself?”
“A slip of the tongue,” I said. “I was using world in two different ways.”
“Pray tell,” he sighed.
“There is the world that might be called society, and there is the world that is reality. When I began, my original claim that the world’s lost its mind, I meant that our society is disconnected from reality, so when I admit that I may indeed be mad, I mean that I am mad at society for being false.”
“You want to go camping again, don’t you?”
“That would be nice,” I said.
Tale Told 