Pessoa, c'est nous?

Good morning FP,

I was lying in bed half an hour ago wondering if I should stop writing to you, stop trying to connect to another human being through the medium of writing. For this is a peculiar game I am playing here am I not? 

A man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. He gets a bit closer and recognises that the tree is a kind of proxy for the conversations this man maybe wishes to have with another. So he approaches the man and offers him an ear: talk to me and I will respond as another man might, or even as a tree, he says.

Alternately, a man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. How peculiar, he thinks, and walks on, leaving the man and the tree to whatever understanding they might learn to glean from each other.

Perhaps this is your response to my fable, a poem from 1933?

The master without disciples

had a flawed machine.

Despite its levers and gears

it never did anything.

It served as a barrel organ

when there was no one to hear it.

When silent, it tried to look curious,

but no one came near it.

My soul, rather like that machine,

is flawed, complicated,

erratic,

and serves no purpose at all.