The other night I had a dream in which I met a woman whom I used to regard as a friend. But she’d become an ex-friend – in the following fashion.

An ill-wisher who’d known me from my earliest days had persuaded her into her new condition of former friend. The same ill-wisher had been strenuously getting in touch with people important to me in my New York life and somehow persuading them also – to think ill of me! The people affected included a shared circle of family friends as well as certain colleagues, precious to me and not part of her life.

There were of course a few philosophers, as well as certain valued noncollegial friends, who – exceptionally – rose above these manipulated inversions of trust and truth. But the woman I dreamed about the other night had not been among them.

When I learned that this woman too had been influenced to my detriment, I called her and asked if I could come over to her place to talk. As hostess, she received me in her usual softly pliant manner. 

I began by speaking to the untruth of the accusations against me. With regard to the fact that I and my accuser gave differing accounts of the conduct alleged against me, my hostess cited the classic Japanese film Rashomon, where a violent crime is described in four conflicting ways by four different witnesses. In that film, the question of whose memory to trust is given up as ultimately insoluble. So much for the truth standard.

Next we went to the damaging character of my accuser’s allegations. I pointed out that, in light of the rift between us, I’d resolved to avoid meeting my defamer’s professional friends, even though some had been valued friends of mine as well. My reasoning had been that a woman’s work life has to do with her survival. I’d not wanted, even by an involuntary look or unconscious turn of phrase, to affect that in any harmful way. Yet, I now pointed out, this same protectiveness was not being extended to me.

In response, my hostess disputed the view that there was anything special about collegial friendships. They were not a closed system meriting protection from the rest of human interactions. So much for the professional harm standard.

Finally, I went to the special nature of philosophy, the discipline whose name in Greek means “love of wisdom”: its long, layered, successive and mutually accountable efforts to face the big questions. Ad hominem attacks must be ruled out because the discipline requires a space free from prejudice – made safe for the openness of its quest. 

But she did not see it that way. The field in which she and I were employed was no different from innumerable other skills that must be learned before they can be exercised. None of them offer shelter secluded from outsiders and their attacks. So much for philosophy’s claims to a protected space set aside for its defining search for wisdom.

With the end of that evening, my effort to restore a collegial sense of trust ended too. She and I had never been particularly close. The evening I’ve described might have been the first and last time we had deliberately met alone. She was a teaching assistant, having never finished graduate study or published work of her own in the field. She claimed to cherish a warm memory of my father, though I don’t know if she’d ever taken a course with him. When we met, it was typically on occasions when a common friend had invited each of us to some larger collegial get-together.

Yet our final interview remained painful in my recollection. Although she was younger than I was, she died unexpectedly. We never met again.

Until the other night, when – in a vivid dream – she appeared. She looked different than she had in life, more compact and pulled together. Here she was not the frail, tall, gangly, junior-level supplicant that she’d looked to be in her earthly career. I wondered if her former appearance had been a put-on.

And speaking of disguises, absent too were her earlier references to Rashomon and how each person’s truth was “true for her or true for him.” Gone as well was her former down-playing of the field of philosophy. 

In this reunion, she’d been perfectly aware that deliberately defamatory lies and candid truthfulness are wholly different, in kind and intent. She knew what philosophic work required. In sum, she’d known it all, without ambiguity, ambivalence or confusion.

She apologized, saying that she was now setting forth on a different life path. And she asked me to forgive her.

I hesitated, just long enough to sense her sincerity, and then I did forgive her. 

When the truth has been given its due,

there is nothing left to give –

but forgiveness.