As you thumb through this little book of mine, wearing the slightly mocking smile that’s accompanied your perusal since the start, I’m happy to report that two visitors, one within the other, have suddenly come on the scene to show you how fatuous that smile is. 
     I know you’re still bewildered, irritated, mortified by your disgraceful behavior towards your old friend, the one you hurriedly sent away with that feeble excuse after another friend showed up, since you couldn’t tolerate the former—his presence, speech, and laughter—in the company of the latter. Why did you banish him like that? When just moments before his replacement arrived you’d been laughing and bantering away happily together? 
     Banish. Who? Your friend? You don’t think you banished him? 
     Let’s examine the circumstances.
     There was nothing in Friend I’s nature that might have justified ejection when Friend II came along. They were strangers; you introduced them; they might have enjoyed each other’s company making small talk for half an hour in your living room. No awkwardness on either side. 
     The awkwardness—as you watched the pair make surprising connections—was your own. So you immediately had to break these bonds. Why? Well (and for some reason you still don’t want to understand), with the arrival of your new friend, you suddenly discovered yourself to be two people, two types; and when you reached a point where you were unable to put up with your inner schism a moment longer you had to banish one. But it wasn’t that first friend you banished; no, you banished yourself, the self you’d been with that first friend, because, with the arrival of the second friend, you began to feel the need to be someone completely other than the person you’d been, or were trying to be. 
     Impeccably well-mannered strangers, your friends weren’t a bad match and might just have established a bond; but here’s what was uncomfortable: the two people you suddenly found in yourself. The inability to tolerate aspects belonging to one mixing with aspects belonging to the other, the pair inside of you having not so much as a thing in common. Nothing. Nothing, since your old friend occupied one reality and the new one another, so profoundly incompatible that an alarm went off alerting you to the fact that, if you spoke to one the other would stand there staring at you dumbfounded; he wouldn’t recognize you anymore; and would exclaim to himself: 
     “Impossible. Who is this guy?”
     And at the unbearable prospect of finding yourself simultaneously and humiliatingly exposed you had to seek a petty excuse to extricate yourself, not from either of them, but from one of the two selves that those two friends had obliged you to be at the same time. 
     Go on, go on, go back to reading this little book of mine, but no more smiling the way you’ve been smiling till now. 
     Believe me, if the scenario I just outlined made you uncomfortable, it was trifling, dear readers, because you are not just two selves, but goodness knows how many, without being aware of it, all the while believing yourself to be merely one. 
     Proceed.