" I said, renewing the attack.
"Remember the example of William Turner, the English landscape painter?
He embodied in this next example what I attempted to clarify by
argument. In crossing to Calais he had himself strapped to the mast at
storm's height so that he might better witness the pummeling of his own
ship. A breakthrough in the use of colour lead to the hey day of
romanticism and preparation for neo-impressionism. This all came
through one man's willingness to live events in the flesh not by
haphazard random reading."

Wenceslaus was staring out the window apparently unmoved by what I, in
my vanity, thought the near-definitive illustration.

"So you suggest that for me to write effectively about a given period I
must breathe the very strains, the odours, verisimilitude of the age?
By that account no one would be accredited teaching Macedonian history
unless he first had witnessed the Hellenic revival in the first
millennium before Christ. I would bloody well have to be impervious to
all the dictates of common sense to follow through on your suggestions!"

"To prolong your garrulous argument, let me continue with this case in
point: to understand the problems of the blacks or talk intelligently
about the colour bar I would have to dye my skin and assume the
identity of a Negro. Is this correct?"

"Well, hasn't that been done?" I replied carefully.

"Yes, but not for the reasons you advance."

"For sociological reasons, for the sake of novelty to do ...", he
finished with a gesture.

"This argument is growing stale and circular, he began anew. Quite
frankly, I grow tired of you and your pedantics. You remind me of the
Medieval Schoolmen and their emphasis on clarification to the point of
excluding Truth. Yes, even Truth if it could not be neatly packaged in
their air-tight groupings."

I perceived Wenceslaus, in a moment of understatement, to be more than
a little disaffected.

"And isn't it you who argues the finer shades between thisness and
whatness, thickness and opaque intrusions at this juncture?" I was now
needling him with his own wealth of details.

"Opaque intrusions," a bewildered smile now entering his face.

"Take out your razor, Ockham." [1]

Wenceslaus fingered the mug more openly. I didn't know who was baiting
whom. I thought I had bested him but realized in doing so I was only
personifying the shallowness I strove to dismantle through argument.

"Wenceslaus, Wenceslaus, let's cease