With a tone that showed her puzzlement, and perhaps a bit of apology, along with something else on which he could not quite put his finger at first, she admitted to him, “I just don’t know why anybody would want to think as much about as many things as you do.”
His reply to her was a silent and gracious smile, which he did not mind to show during the three or four seconds it took him to decide he had better not reveal all his thoughts on the matter. He feared that if he were to tell all, it would demonstrate quite starkly that the divide between their cognitive lives was far greater than she had calculated, and that it would push her to a point of offense beyond her ability to endure without declaring him an enemy, which he was not.
Had he thought she could have handled it—and wouldn’t it be something if that’s just what people were like, where they could handle the truth for what it is—he would have just told her without garnish and without malice, for that is what the truth is generally like—but he was fairly confident that she was in no position to receive such a thing in the spirit of truth, and would count it as malicious, even though it wasn’t. And he feared he would take it as condescending and long-winded if he were to try to break it to her gently, as they say.
She had broached the topic, raising the question, but he was pretty sure she did not want the answer. Not really. And he wondered now whether the part of her tone that he hadn’t grasped at first was that of complaint—that he ought not think so much, so as to be the more convenient friend for her. Was that it? After all, he had detected no hint of admiration in her tone. So yes, perhaps complaint was it. And if that was it, he had chosen well, he thought, to limit his response to a smile.
But had he thought she was up for it, he would have said, as he might have said to a person of a different disposition, something like this: “Ironically—and it may surprise you to discover it—I have already pondered the difference between us somewhat, and I observe three fundamental points of contrast with regard to our cognitive dispositions. One is that though we both have natural self-interest in common, you are considerably more satisfied with self than I am, me having developed much more interest than you in getting at the rest of this world, as well as at the one beyond. And the second, surely related to the first, is that you are much less intrigued by the veritable ocean of truth that surrounds us all, waiting to be explored, while I am almost always itching to get at more of it than I have got at already. And the third—if I dare go on—is that I am content, once I have got my hands on it, to let the truth of a matter be the truth, good or bad, positive or negative, happy or sad, convenient or not, and to let my view of the world be changed accordingly in response, where you seem to guard your current view, shielding yourself from disconfirming information—the fear of which may well be what has driven you to learn to be satisfied while giving your attention to little beyond the very-limited scope of self.”
That’s what he might have said. And it was true—every word of it—so it aggravated him that he could not just tell her the truth. But, then, she had not approached him saying, “You are so advanced beyond me in your thinking, and I wonder if you would tell me why you think this may be, and what are the differences in how we navigate this world in our thinking,” had she? And he was pretty sure that there was no way that she was going to accept the fact that her initial statement, which took her but five seconds to make, was worth hearing five minutes’ worth of answer, which had been derived from eleven months of seeing her in action in various scenarios, and his forty-six years’ worth of treasures, stored up during his highly-reflective life.
And smiling back, off she went to run the errands she had already announced she had to run, never to ponder the conversation again. And there he stood, anxious to get home and write about it, convinced that writing it out might help him to understand even more about how this world operates.
