'I know that,' Kara rejoined, 'but I am going to wait until Roman and my father have met face-to-face.'
'Why?'
'I don't know,' Kara told her honestly, 'but I sense that something important will come of the two of them being in the same place at the same time. I feel it in my bones that something will happen- what, I don't know, but something that will affect all of us.'
'All of us?' Anana asked with a smile. 'You mean your immediate family, of course.'
'No,' Kara rejoined, 'I mean quite literally all of us. I know how ridiculous that must sound to you, but . . . Anana, there is a thing about what you call my "philosophising" that perhaps you should know, and that is an awareness on some level of the underlying structure of things- what you might call the view known as "classicism."
'The thing is, you can't be around men like my father or Roman all your life without getting some sense about the world they live in, and that includes getting glimpses past the façade to the underlying structure of that world.
'For the average person, all they know is the outer façade, but for the movers and shakers of this world, the façade is of little or no consequence whatever. It has the least important of all functions- appearance. It's what goes on underneath that makes things like the appearance itself possible.
'But my father and Roman hold two entirely different views of the underlying structure of things, Anana! And my brother! There is yet a third! Beyond the character and the feelings of each of these men, their views are going to come face-to-face, head-to-head, in direct conflict!'
'You are far too cerebral for me, Kara,' Anana said shaking her head. 'I am content to read the Scriptures in the evenings and feel content that the good Lord is watching over my family and mine.'
'Yes, well, there is an old Roman saying which says, "Beware the man of one book,"' Kara said with a smile.
'Are you calling me a fanatic?'
'You? Hardly! Actually, I was sort of thinking out loud. When you think about it, my father and my brother are men of one book. But Roman . . . if I let myself just feel where he is concerned, then I know all that I need to know about him. But when I try to get my head around him, then I find myself running in circles.
'He seems to have no set plan in life- he just seems to spin an unending series of contingencies at each moment as it evolves. Yet there is structure to his contingencies. But he improvises constantly, and his improvising seems to be the key to the way he does things, because it has form and structure, and provides an endlessly malleable framework on which to hang his ever-changing contingencies.