wanted a chance to have his say, and I was going to do my
best to not interrupt. I owed him that much.
“Ever since we met, you’ve been talking about right and
wrong as if they were absolutes. According to you, things
are either right or they’re wrong . . . period. ‘Was Aahz
right to leave?’ . . . Are you wrong to try to bring him
back? . . . Well, my young friend, life isn’t that simple.
Not only are you old enough to know that, you’d better
learn it before you drive yourself and everyone around you
absolutely crazy!”
He began to float back and forth in the air in front of me
with his hands clasped behind his back. I supposed it was
his equivalent of pacing.
“It’s possible for you, or anyone else to not be right and
still not be wrong, just as you can be right from a business
standpoint, but wrong from a humanitarian viewpoint. The
worlds are complex, and people are a hopless tangle of
contradictions. Conditions change not only from situation
to situation.and person to person, but from moment to mo-
ment as well. Trying to kid yourself that there’s some master
key to what’s right and wrong is ridiculous . . . worse than
that, it’s dangerous, because you’ll always end up feeling
incompetent and inadequate when it eludes you.”
Even though I was having trouble grasping what he was
saying, that last part rang a bell. It described with uncom-
138 Robert Asprin
fortable accuracy how I felt about myself more often than
not! I tried to listen more closely.
“You’ve got to accept that life is complicated and often