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that you are such a tough person."
I said, "It is good to know from the very beginning. This is the first day; there is still a chance: you can simply tell me and I will leave."
"No," he said, "we will try." He took me to the vice-chancellor.
I always used to live in my own way, and the vice-chancellor had been a professor at Oxford, had lived almost his whole life in England, and had become almost a proper Englishman. He said something about my beard which I was just growing: "Why have you not shaved your beard?" My professor became afraid that this was the beginning of the end.
I said, "You are asking a wrong question; in fact, I should ask why you have shaved your beard -- because I am not growing mine; it is growing itself. Your question is nonsensical -- you could ask why have I not cut my fingers, you could ask anything. It is natural that a man should have a beard, you are being unnatural. You have to answer me -- why have you been shaving your beard?"
My poor professor, who was sitting by my side, started nudging me. I had to tell him, "You stop nudging me. I don't care about all the facilities for which you have brought me to the vice-chancellor. In this moment, my only concern is that he should accept that he has asked a wrong question."
There was great silence for a moment, and the old man said, "In fact, you are logically right. And right now I don't have any answer, because nobody has ever asked this in my life -- I have never thought about it."
I said, "It is your beard, and you have been cutting and cutting and shaving and shaving, perhaps for fifty years, without ever thinking about what you are doing." So I said, "Okay, you can have time. I will be coming every day at eleven o'clock when the office opens; you can meet me in front of the office. You have to find the answer."
But my professor said, "We have not come here to discuss the beard! It is a question of your further education, your post-graduation, and he is the man who can decide."
I said, "I don't care. For the present, my whole concern is to make him realize that he has lived an unconscious life."
The old man said, "From
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