I am thinking of the snow in Lucia's hair. I look out over the empty school yard, which consists of a sheet of refracted light - light from which my four friends have detached themselves like shadows - and I wonder where my irrepressible desire to tell lies comes from.

"From unhappiness," says Andersen, who is in a position to know. "But you are not unhappy enough. That's why you can't do it. Lying, too, is an Art"

"Why don’t you write novels?" asks Kundera. "Then you can lie a reality."

"Reality is only a shadow," says Plato.

"We Spanish have never been very good at dealing with reality," says d’Ors.

"Reality is more in the line of the Dutch," I mutter, but Plato does not know who or what the Dutch are, and the other three say nothing

(from, of course, cees nooteboom. in the dutch mountains)