"You burn to have your photograph in a tennis magazine."
"I'm afraid so."
"Why again exactly, now?"
"I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines."
"Why?"
"Why? I guess to give my life some sort of meaning, Lyle."
"And how would this do this again?"
"Lyle, I don't know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?"
"You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning."
"I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel? . . . "
"LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?"
"Okey-dokey."
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
"Maybe I ought to be getting back."
"LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang's enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal."
"Animal?"
"You burn with hunger for food that does not exist."
"This is good news?"
"It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame."
"The burning doesn't go away?"
"What fire dies when you feed it? . . . Fame is not the exit from any cage."
"So I'm stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out."
"You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage."
