This Is An Imaginary Story...aren't They All?

The Magician To Some Degree Is Trying To Drive Him Or Herself Mad In A Controlled Setting, Within Controlled Laws.

Look At Him Now, Poor Fellow. That's What A Dose Of Reality Does For You...never Touch The Stuff Myself, You Understand. Find It Gets In The Way Of The Hallucinations.

The Central Question Is, Is This Guy Right? Or Is He Mad? What Do You, The Reader, Think About This? Which Struck Me As A Properly Anarchist Solution. I Didn't Want To Tell People What To Think, I Just Wanted To Tell People To Think And Consider Some Of These Admittedly Extreme Little Elements, Which Nevertheless Do Recur Fairly Regularly Throughout Human History.

It's Pretty Much A Fact That Our Entire Universe Is A Mental Construct. We Don't Actually Deal With Reality Directly. We Simply Compose A Picture Of Reality From What's Going On In Our Retinas, In The Timpani Of Our Ears, And In Our Nerve Endings.

There... Poor Little Things. You See Them? Standing With Their Numbers On Their Blank, Indifferent Faces, Nuremberg In Miniature, The Ranks Of Painted Wooden Men... Poor Dominoes. Your Pretty Empire Took So Long To Build, Now, With A Snap Of History's Fingers Down It Goes.