Buatku, percakapan-percakapan paling menyenangkan selalu terjadi antara tiga orang.

Dua orang dapat bercakap, tetapi setelah beberapa lama mereka menginginkan suara ketiga. Sebab dua tidak membangun; dimensi hanya terbentuk saat ada tiga sudut.

Sedang empat orang dalam percakapan bagiku sering terasa satu terlalu banyak. Terkadang percakapan terasa penuh ketergesaan, dan kehilangan bentuk sebab ditarik dari terlalu banyak arah.

Hindu punya tiga dewa, Kristen lekat dengan trinitas, Filsuf menyukai trikotomi. Buatku ini bukan kebetulan; tiga adalah keseimbangan, kontinuitas, jumlah yang lengkap dan tak berlebih. Segala kualitas yang kucari dari sebuah percakapan.

I hope whatever lies ahead will be worth the bumpy ride.

Kamu tahu, kamu tidak pernah berjanji. Tidak pernah berhutang. Tidak pernah bersepakat.

Tapi setiap tahun, marka di kalendermu terasa seperti janji yang harus dipenuhi. Hutang yang harus dibayar. Kesepakatan yang harus dijalankan.


Mungkin kamu merasa bersalah. Karena itu kamu lingkari tanggal hari ini. Entah untuk berapa tahun sampai rasa bersalahmu habis. Janjimu penuh. Hutangmu terbayar.

Aku setuju; kata maaf terlalu klise dan membuat canggung percakapan. Karena itu di kalenderku sendiri, aku punya tanggal-tanggal yang aku lingkari.

The combination of the cause of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no inkling of immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause. In historical events, where the actions of men form the subject of observation, the most primitive conception of a cause was the will of the gods, succeeded later on by the will of those men who stand in the historical foreground—the heroes of history. But one had but to look below the surface of any historical event, to look, that is, into the movement of the whole mass of men taking part in that event, to be convinced that the will of the hero of history, so far from controlling the actions of the multitude, is continually controlled by them. It may be thought that it is a matter of no importance whether historical events are interpreted in one way or in another. But between the man who says that the peoples of the West marched into the East, because Napoleon willed they should do so, and the man who says that that movement came to pass because it was bound to come to pass, there exists the same difference as between the men who maintained that the earth was stationary and the planets revolved about it, and the men who said that they did not know what holds the earth in its place, but they did know that there were laws controlling its motions and the motions of the other planets. Causes of historical events—there are not and cannot be, save the one cause of all causes. But there are laws controlling these events; laws partly unknown, partly accessible to us. The discovery of these laws is only possible when we entirely give up looking for a cause in the will of one man, just as the discovery of the laws of the motions of the planets has only become possible since men have given up the conception of the earth being stationary.

There was a saying I heard once that goes more or less like this: "In a relationship between A, B, and C, if A dies, B loses not only A, but parts of C that only A can bring out."

I don't know much about losing, but this much I know: human beings are not numbers. Our dynamics is not a constant, a given. You subtract one out of five, you do not necessarily get four. There's a good chance you'll end up with zero.




And if you think you're prepared to lose one, ask yourself if you're really ready to end up with none. Because when it comes to people, sometimes that's just how the math works.