“Some of us are in confusion; we labor through it, we perceive it where it isn’t, we see it threefold where it’s thick; we can scarcely say anything at all
for as soon as we begin to utter a word we learn how senseless it all is. This advice is not for those people, but for others who feel it is possible to say the anything-at-all that people enjoy saying. What is the advice? Well—when I feel that it is finally possible to open my mouth and speak, I stop to see if I should. Perhaps I am standing somewhere and the people around me have for reasons of their own decided to keep their mouths shut. Then maybe I have thought of something to say. What I do is: I say the thing I am going to say silently in my head, and then I say what I construe to be the opposite of that thing. Too often for my own comfort I find that the opposite proves also to be true. At such a time I keep my mouth shut and rescind my silent proposal. Or I don’t! Maybe I imagine myself enjoying saying one of them, the thing or its opposite, and then I do. I’ll just blurt it right out. Or sometimes I’ll say both, and then my friends and I laugh and laugh at how pitiful this life is.”
—Jesse Ball, author of How to Set a Fire and Why (Pantheon, 2016)
Photo credit: Joe Lieske