the dialogue that was one man talking to himself
This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, possibly, for listening to.
Context
An all-night argument between two people turns out, at its climax, to have been partly one man arguing with a version of the other he supplies the lines to. Marathe catches Steeply ventriloquizing him — building an opponent, answering it, and getting angry at the answer — and names it as the cage of self worn as conversation: talk that never needs the other's mouth to open, never needs him present at all. The most sustained dialogue in the book diagnoses itself as solipsism.