dangling dialogue

-- How is your French? he asked
- Pretty good.
-- Read L'Homme Revolte by Camus. It came out last year. You can get it in French.
- We are reading the same books, I said. Then I said, Not everyone who resorts to violence is a fool. Remember the story of Abraham lopping off the heads of the idols.
-- Yes, he said. I can understand violence if a person makes a rational decision that his world is utterly evil and irredeemable and that nothing in it is worth saving.
- Not many people can make a decision like that rationally.
-- They ought to read some good books.
- Marx read a lot of good books.
-- Marx was full of rage. Books don't do much good when you're that full of rage.
- We're all full of rage. That's something I've begun to think about these days. Who isn't full of rage?
-- Yes. But most people manage in one way or another to handle it.
- Why are people so full of rage? How would your friend Freud answer that?
-- With a lecture on sex and repression, and by drawing you a model of the id, ego, and superego.
- Would it help?
-- To some extent. It would begin to teach you how to become aware of yourself. That's what the soul is, I think. Self-awareness.
- The soul.
-- The crust is self-delusion. The soul is self-awareness.
-And if you're rebelling and are full of rage and don't have that self-awareness - what then?

-- You become a Marx..