She had an idea that pleased no one: that whatever we do is what we like to do. Even her closest friends raised their eyebrows when she took the opportunity to voice it. On several occasions she tried to explain it piece by piece — how it followed that what people do is what we like to do, because when we decide that we want to do something else, we find ourselves able to do something else quite quickly — and the people to whom she explained it picked up on one thread of the idea or another, yet no one liked it. Some people were disturbed by the amount of free will it ascribed to its subjects; some people were disturbed by the idea that we could go on doing something we liked while thinking we didn’t like it, almost everyone found it dogmatic and lacking in sympathy, and C even termed it “callous.”

She tried to explain many times why she found it such an exciting, even radical idea — that once we recognized our desires we could find support from either God or the universe, we choose, to either change or fulfill them, again, we choose — but there was either too much God in the idea for other people’s tastes, or else not enough God, and no matter what way she found to describe it, the idea pleased no one. Eventually she gave up, and decided to sit inside herself quietly and watch the world with the knowledge that whatever we do is what we like to do and tell no one about it, and even this, she realized, is what she must have wanted all along, to sit quietly inside herself and tell no one about it, because what we do is what we like to do and we always find a way of bringing about what we like.

Only R understood, but he took the idea to a place much further away, almost to a point at which she didn’t recognize or understand the idea any more, and the way he did it, quickly and quietly, scared her, so she retreated back onto her little island of intellectual safety and comfort, aware all the while that this itself was the problem, and the reason she used the metaphor of islands for other people and not some other kind of metaphor.

epilogue

After a long time she realized that she couldn’t tell if what she wanted was to find one other person who liked the idea or to confirm her suspicion that no one ever would, until she realized the key was to reverse into the question, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the back of the passenger seat. The question was not whether she wanted x or y — x being another person who liked her idea, y being the absence of any person who liked her idea — the question was, given the fact that she already had y, and given also the fact that what we do is what we like to do, why was y the thing she wanted?