The deeper dialogue with the devil is most frequently that agonizing personal insight. It is so often a couched self-deception—felt, yet known—which has slipped into the mist-shrouded realms of our consciousness. We know through a glass darkly, that the agony is real and sweeping through our soul as we live each day. This intimate, destabilizing dialogue is, however, with ourselves. Descartes’ evil, malicious demon (or others, e.g., Laplace, the bible, some contemporary writers) is a fiction in itself: an empty, human, non-substantial verbal pretension, devised to steer thoughts, imaginations and actions along a slippery path. Encounters with the devil are not so light or abstract as these pretend ones. There is no path on life’s fog run. We can quietly whisper “if only…”, as we address the dialogue we are about to encounter. Treatment is not faith or truth. What is fog, after all?
