Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas

PANGLOSS: Next! Ah — oh that is immediately a bite. Excellent! Clarity! Sit down. How?

PATIENT: A dog. It was scratching and jumping first. Then a man nearby whispered a word and it bit me. Directly after.

PANGLOSS: A word!

PATIENT: Mordere. Or close to it. He was whispering. Strange looking. Robes of some kind. Gone the moment it happened.

PANGLOSS: (pause)

Mordere. That is Latin. To bite.

PATIENT: Yes.

PANGLOSS: You don’t speak Latin.

PATIENT: No.

PANGLOSS: So you heard an unfamiliar word, whispered, while a dog was scratching at you, in a moment of considerable—

PATIENT: And then the dog bit me. In that order.

PANGLOSS: (applying dressing, rallying) Remarkable! The classical world alive in our very streets! Caesar himself would—

PATIENT: I called for help. A man nearby. He said he couldn’t help because he couldn’t speak the language of the dog.

PANGLOSS: (pause)
He felt the solution was conversational. With the dog.

PATIENT: Yes. He has no home. He sleeps on the wall opposite.

PANGLOSS: (very quietly)
Ah.

And the robed man.

PATIENT: Gone entirely.

PANGLOSS: (brightly, almost to himself) So. A whispered word in a language you don’t speak. Scratches which any reasonable person might call — boisterous play. A bite which followed the word but which, without the word, is simply — a bite. A witness who wished to negotiate with the dog and who sleeps on a wall.

PATIENT: That is what happened, yes.

PANGLOSS: Of course! And in the best of all possible worlds truth is always—

Truth is generally—

PATIENT: Doctor.

PANGLOSS: The scratching, you see, is the difficulty. If the dog had only bitten—

PATIENT: But it scratched first.

PANGLOSS: Yes. And someone who was not there will say the dog was playing. Got overexcited. And the bite was incidental. And the word was—

PATIENT: Was what?

PANGLOSS: (carefully) Misheard. Or not a word at all. The sort of sound a person makes when they are watching a dog jump at a stranger and feel — nothing in particular about it.

PATIENT: (slowly) You’re describing how this looks to someone who wasn’t there.

PANGLOSS: (with sudden enormous enthusiasm for the bandage he is applying)
This is excellent dressing work. Really some of my finest. The technique I am using was developed in—

PATIENT: Am I going to be blamed for this?

PANGLOSS: Ah! Now HERE is where the situation reveals its EXTRAORDINARY hidden bounty! Because consider — to be falsely accused is not, as the uninitiated might suppose, a misfortune! It is in fact a TRIUMPH of sorts!

PATIENT: Is it.

PANGLOSS: For what is a false accusation but proof that you are a person of sufficient consequence to be worth accusing! Insignificant people are never falsely accused! Nobody bothers! The very fact that someone — or indeed several someones — might find it worthwhile to arrange events so that blame attaches to YOU specifically demonstrates that you MATTER in the grand tapestry of—

PATIENT: The dog bit me.

PANGLOSS: Yes but consider the PHILOSOPHICAL—

PATIENT: A stranger’s dog. Commanded in Latin. By a man in robes.

PANGLOSS: And this SINGULARITY of experience! Most people go their entire lives without—

PATIENT: Doctor.

PANGLOSS: Furthermore! A false accusation, once weathered, produces in the accused a MORAL FORTITUDE, a clarity of character, a—

PATIENT: Does it.

PANGLOSS: The innocent man who survives false accusation emerges REFINED! Like metal through fire! And the truth, which cannot be permanently suppressed in the best of all possible worlds, will inevitably—

PATIENT: Will it.

PANGLOSS: (slightly less certainly)
Generally will—

PATIENT: With a homeless witness who can’t speak to dogs.

PANGLOSS: (pause)

Truth is a wheel that turns, and—

PATIENT: How slowly.

PANGLOSS:

(all the air going out of him)

It is possible that certain people may find it easier to believe that a dog does not bite without provocation.

PATIENT: I didn’t provoke it.

PANGLOSS: No.

But you were there. And the man was not. And the word is gone. And your witness—

PATIENT: Sleeps on a wall and speaks to no dogs.

PANGLOSS: (straightens instruments unnecessarily)

Come back tomorrow. And if you pass that wall—

PATIENT: Yes?

PANGLOSS: (quietly, without conviction)

In the best of all possible worlds a man who cannot speak the language of dogs is still a man who was there.

Probably.