There really is no way
around this. You have to return my books to me. They are my personal property.
I won’t have any more of my property lost or damaged on behalf of ignorance,
pettiness, and neglect. I let you keep them, for some short time, in the false
hopes that they would teach you the lessons that, had you learned them by now, would
have prompted you to return the books upon completion. There is quite a number
of things that are like that. They are non-negotiable. For instance, you figured
out very quickly that the significance of your near-death experience was that
you had to learn to be generous. This you managed by helping Chandler find a
safe haven from his adversaries. Yet you forgot this when you tried to hold me
in some illusory debt that obviously I will never owe you. This is my point:
all of these lessons, if they are true lessons, will allow us to arrive upon a
common ground. I do not need you to tell me what they are; I know them all
ready. I read these books long before you did. And nothing that you read in any
other book can mitigate their significance. If you still find some excuse for
refusing to perform your duties to me, then you clearly have not internalized
what you were supposed to, and you will not do so by that avenue. I can no
longer condone this. You had them in your possession for an allotted time, and
that time is now exhausted. I will not ask you again. Return them to me in the
manner that I dictated. And remember that even if I owed some debt to you that
this debt would still take precedence. And I owe you nothing. I do not feel
that I owe you money. You may pretend to feel that I do. But I know that I don’t.
I do not need to go outside of my own feelings in order to determine right from
wrong; it’s YOUR responsibility to accommodate them. If you continue to contradict
them then I must take action against you. Had I owed you any thing, I would
have felt differently, and I would have acted on that feeling. Many times I’ve
done this. That this letter is convenient to me now only proves this much: that
I have the easy job. Do not make it difficult. It would be no less convenient
for me to earn the money you pretend I owe you and to pay it back to you. But
that convenience would only be the case were it true that I actually owed it to
you. This is not the case, and I cannot afford to pretend that it is so. Hence I
absolve myself of any suspicions of wrongdoing. That this is convenient to me only
follows logically from the fact that I am in the Right. I am not prone to
self-interest. What is convenient to me is only that which is just. And you
shall find that to be the case for most people.
Dm.A.A.
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