"If I cannot trust my own memories," she said, "what is left?"
The philosopher looked out the window. Afternoon light. Pigeons.
"You are asking the wrong question," he said finally.
"Then what is the right one?"
"Not 'what can I trust' but 'what does trust require.' You are treating memory as a recording device. It is not. It is a reconstruction — a story the mind tells itself about the past."
She was quiet for a moment. "And if the story is wrong?"
"All stories are wrong. Some are useful."
"That seems like a very convenient position for someone who studies epistemology."
He smiled. "It is not convenient. It is devastating, if you follow it honestly. The question is what you do with the devastation."
She picked up her coffee cup. Cold now. She drank it anyway.
"The Stoics had an answer," he said. "Not to the problem of memory — but to the problem of uncertainty. They called it amor fati."
"Love of fate."
"Love of what is. Not the past you remember, not the future you fear — the present, as it is, with all its uncertainty intact."
"That sounds like giving up."
"It sounds like that. It isn't." He turned from the window. "What would you do right now, if you knew your memory was unreliable?"
She thought about it.
"The same things," she said slowly. "I would do the same things."
He nodded. "Then perhaps that is your answer."
The pigeons scattered. The light shifted. The afternoon continued, certain only of itself.