Dear Andrew,

Although I understand that your way of mourning was different than mine, it is only because you have proven your loyalty as a friend that I can so readily forgive you for the comment that I am "obsessed with the truth". Perhaps that had rendered to me some of your attitude of emotionally stifled shock, but I assure you that it would have been better that you allow me to feel as I was... inclined to; I might have helped in your healing. There is no moment in life in which an insult such as that can be appropriate, and following in a path towards comprehending it is a tragic blunder that I require a heroic effort of will to forgive myself for. If our mutual confusion as a race is to be pardoned, it can only be in the unspoken agreement that that statement is never true, and if we are to be in any way successful we must admit that it is unspoken not because what looms behind our silence is a jeering, self-assured god but rather the stunned loss for words of genuine bafflement and its sibling, the silence which is awe at those rare moments when we see the world. Forgive me for this poor wording, but I understand that hyperbole is taken by readers here too literally and politically. Suffice to say, it was as though you proclaimed that God was not a poet.

Dmitry