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[fruktansvard]

[ He's haphazardly dressed in something that could be considered vintage pieces of a noble era long gone. A tiny little glass of liquor by a bottle of it. To the side lay a small plate of smoked meat and a pen and a paper with notes and scribbling inside and this is all that occupies the otherwise open table.

He puts the pen down and looks outward with a calm exhale. ] What philosophies shape your life?

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[fruktansvard]

A doctor [ the tone, even keeled and calm, speaks a certain amount of interest. Long ago, the practice was very different. While medicine grew and evolved, he lost his interest. Although you could say many of his practices still fall beneath medicinal. Alternative, they'd say. Hoax others might claim. ]

Now these words you speak [ His hand gestures are fluid, loose, flowing. They follow his overall demeanor of calm and graceful. ] True wisdom if ever I did hear it.

It seems so... [ He breaks, and starts again. It's not that his English is poor but sometimes when engaged in conversation it's a little more difficult to put it together than in his native tongue. ] Youth as of late, I find, cannot even begin to sort their emotional field.

[ there's a short laugh ] Not as if that is uncommon to youth of all generations, but more is the reaction of adults to this phenomenon. Either black or white- you're special and hidden from emotional pain - which inspires growth or you're weak for being emotional and told to hide it which inevitably does the same thing.

What kind of people are we building when the root of what a human is, is abandoned?

[peratic]

Trying to be, anyway. [ She doesn't plan to flunk out or anything, but one thing she has learned: medicine, particularly when you want to be an actual brain surgeon, is competitive. Gisela is ambitious, but she doesn't like to be presumptuous.

She sits back in her chair while she listens, hands folded on her crossed knees. ]

Confused ones, I guess. Ones that aren't satisfied by anything they seem to find. Which is normal, but the means feel new, don't they? [ She's 22. Probably her perspective on this is not quite what it would be if she were even a decade older, but Gisela is, at least, attuned to the desensitization she sees in people who came up in secure middle to upper-class homes. And it bewilders her that they can seem more jaded and bored with life than the ones who grew up in war zones. ]

I think young people are aware of that paradox, too, which frustrates them. They feel like they've inherited something they can't fix. My fifteen-year-old sister is in that group.

There's another author I like — so this is another philosophy, sort of — and he wrote that irony and cynicism were necessary in the 1950s, but now cynicism, 'cynical transcendence of sentiment', he said, is some kind of fear of being human. So then I consider that maybe people are just more afraid.

[fruktansvard]

In what field? [ He doesn't suspect she will flunk. She carries herself with an intellect that far outdoes his, he'd openly confess. Fabian is certain he hit his IQ threshold long ago. Thank the goddess for hipsters who like the smell of patchouli and macabre minds. ]

I have a lot of faith in the new generation. I lack faith in the generation before them and their ability to properly guide the new flock.

[ . . . ]

David Foster Wallace. [ He reminisces a little. Possibly not the best point of conversation to make but there was something about Wallace that struck a true chord with him, and since they're also talking about masks of rationality: ]

He has a lot of wisdoms. One that strikes me is his perspective on suicide.

[peratic]

Neurosurgery. Maybe neurology. [ Either way she plans to have almost no social life for half a decade, it'll be great. ]

That's right. I didn't agree with him on everything, but the big things he wrote about were universal, it seems like, and he never excluded himself from his own observations. [ Gisela doesn't seem put off by the topic change; when speaking about writers, the subject of suicide is often hard to avoid. There is a new delicacy in the way that she speaks, though, as she feels it's of greater importance to try to choose her words correctly. ]

What struck you about that in particular?

[fruktansvard]

Incredible. [ An honest admiration, that. He leans back and steeples his fingers, listening. There's a small smile forming on his lips even as the topic changes into something more serious. ]

I think that it touches on an important matter of self. If the internal is suffering, everything around it suffers as well. While pain will come to others who loved you, they can move forward. Someone who seeks such drastic measures... I cannot imagine what hell they live in every single day.

whoops sorry for the delay

[peratic]

[ She inclines her head a little, not smiling her thank-you mostly because of the other content of the conversation, and is not quite willing to aggrandize herself, but she is also kind of pleased. It's not that anyone's disappointed in Gisela's career choices, but she doesn't get a lot of feedback from outsiders, either. (Her colleagues are more than happy to fill that void, but that's different.) ]

We study that in medicine, how someone's mental and emotional state impacts them physically, but you're right, it's more than that. It draws in everyone around them, even the environment. But — the worst thing is when someone calls wanting to end it "selfish". They wouldn't say that if it were a gaping chest wound, and for some people, that's what it is.

[ A pause. ] One of the reasons I wanted to get into neurology was to learn about the way the brain sometimes battles against itself. A few misfiring synapses, and...well, people are really very fragile, aren't they? It might be both the worst and nicest thing about them.

worry not :)

[fruktansvard]

[ He was a changeable sort. Like water, his emotions swayed and slipped this way and that. It was hard to startle him in to an extreme state of emotion if just because of how deep those waters run. A learned control, safe to say. She should smile. She should find pride in her intelligence and willingness to go against the odds. ]

It is selfish just as it is selfish to want a suffering person to remain with you. [ he says calmly ] but I feel the term selfish is often considered negatively. It's looked at wholly in one way and not seen for what it truly means. I don't think it's a poor quality to be concerned with yourself if it doesn't dictate everything you do.

[ He flattens his jacket a bit and offers a hand. The grip isn't strong and assertive, but not flimsy. Lie the seeming calm he gives off in general. ] I'm Fabian. And who is my fair stranger this aft?

[peratic]

[ The idea that a degree of self-absorption isn't terrible is something Gisela decides to contemplate later. Her eyes lower briefly, thoughts of something far away passing through her expression, only to be replaced by returned focus on Fabian. ]

Gisela. It's good to meet you. [ She doesn't have the neatly professional doctoral grip yet, when she shakes hands, but she's getting there. She's good at steadiness. ] I didn't get a chance to ask about yours, yet — philosophies you consider influential, that is.

[ As with the sartorial choices, she notices (but does not comment upon) word choices that strike her as unique in contemporary speech. ]

[fruktansvard]

[ It's really because he's a poet that he speaks this way time to time and has nothing to do with anything other than being (occasionally) a pompous shit. He's not that outdated. Although he can speak Swedish like it hasn't changed in a hundred years. It's more likely to notice his accent and moments he struggles with sentence structure over dated language. Alas, no harm. ]

Pleasure. [ a beat- okay maybe two. Fabian inhales deeply and considers this with great measure. There's a pain in thinking about it because what his heart wants to say is also what his heart tears him apart for. ]

Let love in. Be inspired by the world, love the earth, see beauty in everything.