For as long as I've known you, you've always loved peculiar jokes.
That's almost exactly right. You know how it is — they're either peculiar or unfunny. Sure, I can joke in different ways, but more often than not it comes out the way it comes out, yeah.
But why? You could express humor through some other substance.
But why?
So you actually like jokes like that?
Of course not. I'm compelled to joke that way.
Hold on, are you trying to insult the target of the joke right now? Like, they wouldn't get any other kind of humor.
No, I'm saying exactly what I'm saying, don't drag it into the moral plane.
I still can't grasp how you reconcile jokes like these with, say, reading someone like Rousseau. Clearly you're lying somewhere.
I want to and I'm compelled to — those are different things. Turgenev has a thought that the appearance of the mundane is often useful in life: it slackens strings tuned too high, sobers self-assured or self-forgetful feelings, reminding them of their close kinship with it.
My subconscious critic loves to joke like this; that's how it defends itself against the consciousness philosophizing too much.
Then I can't figure out where your Self is. One thing you want, another you're compelled to do.
I don't understand it myself. But nowhere am I lying.