- When Creon took over the rule of Thebes I sank back into thankful obscurity and retired to keep company at last with the birds. It was a bird, if you like, who told me the end of the story.
-Tell me, please.
- Do you really want to know?
- You know, I feel it is all I want to know.
- It might go against your grain, Dr Freud.
- Almost everything I have learned has gone against my grain, my friend.
- His end was marvellous. Now there's the thing you didn't grasp.
- Where are you off to? Don't go!
- I'm trying to find the corner of your room, Doctor.
- Why?
- Take me to a corner and I'll show you. Are we there?
- We're facing the French window where you enter.
- And the corner?
- It's here to our right. The other corner is all bookshelves.
- Very well, describe it to me please.
-The corner of my room?
- How many lines meet there?
- How many lines? Three.
- Good. Now describe the directions.
- Two meet at right angles on the horizontal plane and the third makes a right-angled vertical.
- Exactly so.
- Well?
- Well what?
- Aren't you going to explain?
- I would have thought it obvious. It was the third road, the vertical. He took it at last.
- Where to?
- Ah, that's not for me to say. We call it the gods; you may, if you like, Dr Freud, call it 'reality'. The sanction of the gods, the sanction of reality - what's in a name? In any case, it's what you come up against when cornered, and that is when you may begin to know what you are made of and who, really, you are.
- Salley Vickers - p.180-182
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