“Don’t say ‘can’t’,” she said again.  “It’s not that you can’t do things, you can.  It’s that you don’t make yourself do them.”  

“A distinction without a difference,” he said.  

“No,” she said, “saying ‘I can’t’ means you’re incapable of doing them and it is far different from not making yourself do things you are clearly capable of.”  

“Is it really?” he said. “If I don’t do something I am clearly capable of, something I want to do, something it frustrates me not to be doing, doesn’t it mean, for all practical purposes, that I can’t do it?”  

“It means you won’t do it,” she said.  “It doesn’t mean you can’t”.

“The beggar says to the woman in the mink coat ‘please help me, I haven’ t eaten in three days’….” he said.

“And the woman says ‘force yourself”.   Yes, you are very witty, Shlomo, but better to use your energy for seriousness at the moment,” she said.  

“Energy?” he said.

The conversation was a circle, it moved like the hands on a clock that had long ago given up trying to keep time.  It would move in a circle and stop, sit in the dark, and when the light went on again, it would continue to pointlessly circle.