Who is to Blame?

Chapter 7 is now officially complete, at 15 pages and 4500 words. Yes, the consistency is wonderful. But what can I say of the chapter itself? It was written in chunks, some of it as long ago as September. Over half was done before last night. The half that I wrote tonight, however, it hurt me. Writing it sincerely hurt me. There is no other way to put it. Ralph and Mark discuss, briefly albeit, who is to blame, and by God, it is so painful to have to put two characters whom you love dearly through such a horrid conversation. I don't know. I just don't know. I can't paste that here, on this blog. Here is another sad excerpt, though not quite so sad.

“Oh, Ralph, you know that I have already left you. It is simply a question of when you can let me go.”
“And if I can’t, sir?” Ralph had never felt so positively abject, “How am I supposed to go on like this? How, sir, how?”
His smile vanished. Quite seriously, Mark intoned, “Live, Ralph. Just live until you die”
“And what if I don’t want to live?” he whispered faintly.
Mark smiled sadly before letting himself fade into the past, back into his schooldays. “Plutôt souffrir que mourir, c’est la devise des hommes.”
Ralph would have been surprised, if he had been capable of surprise anymore. Instead, he felt the weight of reality sink in his stomach—the knowledge that this wasn’t real, not any of it. Yet he indulged his fantasy wearily, “Sir?”
“It’s from a French fable,” Mark answered obliviously. “La Mort et le Bûcheron, or Death and the Woodcutter. The woodcutter lives a life of sadness—not loneliness, just simple sadness. He calls Death, and she comes without waiting. Then he changes his mind—decides he doesn’t want to die. That, Ralph, is the moral of the story: it is always better to suffer than to die. No matter how terrible things get, how horrible the world comes to seem, how cruel life becomes to you, do not forget it. There is always something for which to live, Ralph, for which to die. Always. And when you find there is no cause, no person, nothing worth living and dying for, then that is the day to die—the day when you lose faith in everyone and everything. That is the day that I was always afraid I would live to see, and thank God I did not live to see it. I hope you never have to see it either.”
“Don’t you see, sir?” the sum of Ralph’s sadness welled up in his tear ducts. “I’ve already seen that day, sir; I’m living it.”
“Oh, Ralph.” The pity in Mark’s eyes deepened profoundly with each sentence his poor Vice President uttered. “Don’t you see that you’re doing it to yourself? Everything that I am trying to warn you against, you are letting happen, Ralph.”
“I already told you, sir,” he answered meekly, “I’m self-destructing.”
“Stop it, Ralph. Stop it now,” Mark returned with the harshness he had had in life. “Stop saying it, stop thinking it, and by God, stop letting yourself do it. Focus on the positive; focus on your purpose. If you can do that, everything will fall into place.”
Ralph shook his head, “Sir, there isn’t any purpose for living so far as I can tell. I simply make a mess of whatever decent aspects there are in life. I don’t try, but it’s entropy, sir. Everything tends toward a natural state of chaos.”
Mark answered gravely, “Check your premises, Ralph.”