'Yes?' asked the owl.
'Thank you,' the rabbit replied eagerly, 'I did want to ask you a question, but I was afraid of interrupting your thoughts.'

'Interrupting my... what?' cried the owl, raising his wings in indignation.
'Your, well your... I did say your thoughts I'm afraid,' the rabbit replied apologetically.

'Only wingless human-beings waste their time with superficial objective nonsense like that!' the owl snapped indignantly, clacking his beak. 'Their minds are split from soon after childhood to the grave.'
'I think I have heard you say that "space" and "time" are "objective nonsense" also,' said the rabbit, 'and I wanted to know why that is so.'

'Objectively and for the same reason, they are chemically-pure nonsense,' replied the owl, 'but subjectively they are what you seem to be as an objective appearance.'
'Why is that?' asked the rabbit, raising an ear.

'If your appearance were not extended dimensionally in "space", and if your appearance had no duration in "time", you could not appear,' replied the owl; 'is not that obvious?'
'And you could not see me?' mused the rabbit.

'You would not be there either to be seen or to look,' the owl pointed out.
'So that all phenomenal appearance is "pure non-sense"?' the rabbit exclaimed.

'One would think that you were beginning to understand something,' the owl commented with surprise.
'But if that were understood everything should become clear and there would be nothing further to discuss!' argued the rabbit thoughtfully.

'As you say,' snapped the owl, 'could anything be more obvious?'
'Then why don't you teach it?' the rabbit queried.

'I do not teach,' hooted the owl, 'I answer questions, but the askers do not seem to pay attention to the answers.'
'So that when you say it you are a "voice crying in the wilderness",' suggested the rabbit.

'An owl hooting in the empyrean,' corrected the owl.
'Must be lonely,' the rabbit sympathized, 'the empyrean looks empty.'

'Only an object can be lonely,' the owl snapped. 'I am not an object.'
'But when you are hooting in the empyrean, are you not an object?'

'Only to you,' the owl answered, fixing her with his great eyes.
'But how is that?' asked the rabbit.

'All objects are only such to a "you",' the owl urged. 'Cannot you see that?'
'And you, not being an object, are not lonely?' the rabbit asked, scratching one ear meditatively.

'All objects are inevitably lonely,' the owl pointed out, 'being apparently separate; split and alone they think they are unhappy. I am never lonely.'
'But why is that?'

'How could I be lonely?' hooted the owl. 'I am the empyrean. How-whit -how-whit -how-whooo: I who am everything, I who am no "thing"!'