Alibi

What's your alibi? I was somewhere else. Alibi = elsewhere. That we are elsewhere implies that there is a home where we belong, that we live in exile; to be elsewhere is a permanent human condition on earth. Elsewhere might be time, or might be that we are in the moving present, losing forever the moment just passed, and therefore we cannot be sure what it is 'to be', because the direct experience is not of being, but of losing our existence in the irretrievable 'has been'.

Paraphrased from an extraordinary philosophical work, 'Metaphysical Horror' by Professor Leslek Kolakowski of the University of Chicago, who also writes:

'the very act of knowing , the very fact that our mind communes with the world which it is not and that it can assimilate this world or make of it a self-conscious event, this most common fact, if we look at it without prejudice, is the strangest thing one can imagine.'

So from these quick dips into this work, we see that the very attempt to converse may lead us to slip away into the immediate past, or lead us to attempt to know something about another person and to explore how that person experiences this world we both are trying to know something about.