Scene: Outside the Atheneum at Caltech University, mid autumn. Two sycamores are turning, their yellow leaves scattering across the stone. The sun still penetrates with warmth, but the breeze is chilly. A group of philosphy professors mulls about after an all day session. Ray and Max sit on a stone wall. Between them rests a half-finished thermos of coffee.
Ray (loosening his scarf, studying Max’s face):
You know, Max, I’ve never asked you properly about those years you didn’t speak to your mother. You were in your thirties then?
Max (nodding, hands clasped):
Yes. Three years of silence. Then we found our way back. And now—well, she’s gone. A stroke. It happened suddenly last spring.
Ray:
What did that silence and distance for those three years mean for you? Not just practically, but have you thought about it philosophically?
Max (gives a weary smile):
For me, at the time, it was survival. But, yes, we can explore it philosophically. It was, perhaps, a necessary break to become myself.
Ray:
Identity.
Max:
Exactly. Parents are the first scaffolding of the self. They give us words, values, the sense of who we are. But scaffolding can turn into a cage. She wanted me, even in my thirties, to be an extension of her—mostly her faith, but also her judgments. Estrangement was dismantling the cage.
Ray (tilting his head):
Like Hegel’s dialectic. The child has to negate in order to stand.
Max:
Um . . . yes, that’s good. At the time, it felt like I was betraying her. She gave me life. How do you justify cutting the cord after thirty something years?
A gust of wind teases the leaves at their feet, reminding them of time and impermanence. Max rubs his palms together as if remembering the coldness of that difficult era.
Max:
People think trauma is a single blow. For me, it was erosion. Every conversation an invalidation. Every call, a reminder that I was wrong, broken, damned. That slow wearing away—that was the trauma.
Ray (quietly, leaning forward):
So trauma isn’t the event, but the obstruction. The way coherence is blocked.
Max:
Um, yes. Say more. I guess I’d say that health was that coherence. Living aligned with what you know to be true—the alliance of epistemology and identity.
Ray:
And what was the truth you couldn’t surrender?
Max:
Oh, the usual. That people aren’t damned for loving who they love. That the world is older and vaster than Genesis says. To deny the truth that I’d discovered would be to threaten the very person I was becoming.
Ray:
Of course. So epistemology also became a matter of health.
Max:
Exactly.
Ray:
And how did you reconcile?
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