And anyway was it not so that I could be occupied by them that I was living apart from those people who would complain about not seeing me, so that I could be more deeply occupied by them than I could ever have been with them, in order to try to reveal them to themselves, to make them real? What use would it have been if I had continued for yet more years to waste whole evenings bouncing my equally vain remarks off the hardly defunct echo of theirs, all for the sterile pleasure of a social contact which excludes everything that is not superficial? Was it not better that I should take these
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