Parse Quotes

An algorithm that expedites care to a stroke patient in a chaotic emergency room (ER) has a good chance of adoption. An algorithm that reads a routine scan and provides some quantification of what the physicians can already estimate won’t be in as much demand. There are good reasons for algorithms to parse patient records to look for signs of rare diseases, but there are fewer good reasons for using them to evaluate clinical symptoms. It’s cool that AI tools can make diagnoses from scratch, but for most clinical encounters doctors are already pretty good at it.

Every Valentine's Day, the student council sponsered a holiday fundraiser by selling roses that would be delievered in class. The roses came in four colors:white, yellow, red, pink, and the subtleties of thier meaning were parsed and analyzed by the female population to no end. Mimi had always understood it thus:white for love, yellow for friendship, red for passion, and pink for a secret crush.

The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn't need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful—in which we wouldn't need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all.

How do you know that, Philo, dear?" But Philologos had had enough of being condescended to. "Because, Lamion, I am not as dumb as you think I am, even if you are." By the time Lamion had parsed this to make sure that there was in fact an insult at the end of it, Hilarion had laid a restraining hand on his arm.

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses

Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one casual and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.

Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, 'Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and i got you some while i was out', as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table. It's not a game you don't understand the rules of, or a test you never got the materials to study for. It never leaves you wondering who could possibly be texting at 3 am. Or what you could possibly do to make it come home and stay there. It's fucking boring, dude. I don't walk around mired in uneasiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No parsing through spun tales about why it took her so long to come back from the store. No checking her emails or calling her job to make sure she's actually there. No sitting in my car outside her house at dawn, to make sure she's alone when she leaves. This feels safe, and steadfast, and predictable. And secure. It's boring as shit. And it's easily the best thing I've ever felt.

Scientists at first were skeptical that a kitten-type being could exist in the rare Martian atmosphere. As a test, two Earth kittens were put in a chamber that simulated the Martian air. The diary of this experiment is fascinating: 6:00 A.M.: Kittens appear to sleep. 7:02 A.M.: Kitten wakes, darts from one end of cage to another for no apparent reason. 7:14 A.M.: Kitten runs up wall of cage, leaps onto other kitten for no apparent reason. 7:22 A.M.: Kitten lies on back and punches other kitten for no apparent reason. 7:30 A.M.: Kitten leaps, stops, darts left, abruptly stops, climbs wall, clings for two seconds, falls on head, darts right for no apparent reason. 7:51 A.M.: Kitten parses first sentence of daily newspaper that is at bottom of chamber. With the exception of the parsing, all behavior is typical of Earth kitten behavior. The parsing activity, which was done with a small ball-point pen, was an anomaly.

...Tea. There is nothing saner than tea, he thought. ... Tea was the great leveler. It brought calm, quiet, contentment, warmth. And it was something to do. .....Tea-- so normal, so mundane, so hot... ...The heat and scent of it permeated his head and cleared his mind. He understood completely the attraction of ceremonies grounded in the ritual of drinking tea. It required both caution and abandonment of the senses. It demanded that you move into it slowly and savor the moment. And it rewarded you with warmth and delicacy of taste and refreshment. And after you were done, it could parse out your future.

She wanted to tell the girl: It’s complicated. I am now a person I never imagined I would be, and I don’t know how to square that. I would like to be content, but instead I am stuck inside a prison of my own creation, where I torment myself endlessly, until I am left binge-eating Fig Newtons at midnight to keep from crying. I feel as though societal norms, gendered expectations, and the infuriating bluntness of biology have forced me to become this person even though I’m having a hard time parsing how, precisely, I arrived at this place. I am angry all the time. I would one day like to direct my own artwork toward a critique of these modern-day systems that articulates all this, but my brain no longer functions as it did before the baby, and I am really dumb now. I am afraid I will never be smart or happy or thin again. I am afraid I might be turning into a dog. Instead, she said, smiling, I love it. I love being a mom.

Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision—so there will always be code.

If I'm honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

We live in a highly complex, technological world – and it's not entirely obvious what's right and what's wrong in any given situation, unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don't have the insight to be able to do that very effectively.

[B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell -- a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great -- was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing -- namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. . . Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence -- which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favour of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for would be not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that.

But no matter how much I tried to cling to the shining jewels of my accomplishments, it never took long before my shadow list surfaced. Everything I’d ever failed at, every second place, every rejection, mounting, mounting, mounting, until the suspicion became unbearable. (...) My life was a narrative I couldn’t parse, full of conflicting evidence.

Once you start parsing a face, it's a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots.

Maps held no secrets, no intricacies he could not parse. He could know a place far better than he could know a person.

Enrique used to feel a twinge of shame when it came to his feelings … He used to pray that when it came to attraction, his body would just choose between men and women, and not both. It was his second-oldest brother, bound for priesthood, who told him that God made no mistakes in crafting their hearts. Enrique still hadn’t quite parsed out his own relationship to faith, but what his brother said had made him stop hating himself. It made him stop turning from what lay inside him and embrace it.

I’ve accepted that the whole of my life will be a pilgrimage toward the sound of the genuine in me. This may sound troubling to those who’ve been conditioned to believe that our journey is to God and God alone, but I say the two paths are one. My journey to the truth of God cannot be parsed from my journey to the truth of who I am. A fidelity to the true self is a fidelity to truth. I won’t apologize for this.

Mande mwen yon ti kou ankò ma di ou,’ she’d told Anthony once, when he’d first asked her what she thought of Hermes, if she thought they might succeed. He’d tried his best to parse Kreyòl with what he knew of French, then he’d given up. ‘What’s that mean?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire. ‘At least, we say it when we don’t know the answer, or don’t care to share the answer.’ ‘And what’s it literally mean?’ She’d winked at him. ‘Ask me a little later, and I’ll tell you.

I began to parse the sentence. This is what English majors do. It's what we're trained to do. We don't know how to do anything else, except drive cabs.

Our understanding of the interior lives of those who are not like us is contingent on their ability to articulate themselves in the language we know. The further removed people are from proficiency in that language, the less likely they are to be understood as complex individuals. The audience often fills in the blanks with their own preconceptions. But visual language is more easily parsed and a much more democratic form of communication.

that’s the fate of a storyteller. We become nodal points for the grotesque. We are the ones who say, “Look!” while everyone peeks through their eyes, unable to confront darkness in full force. We articulate what no one else can even parse. We give a name to the unthinkable.

Agenda is bad when it usurps the beauty. Christian art should strive for a marriage of the two, just as Christ is described as being “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Truth without beauty can be a weapon; beauty without truth can be spineless. The two together are like lyric and melody. This is not to say that beauty itself isn’t a kind of truth, nor that truth itself isn’t beautiful. It’ll take a better philosopher than me to parse all that out. (I commend to you authors like Steve Guthrie and Jeremy Begbie if you want to swim in those deep but lovely waters.)

A reaper emerges from the crowd with glossy, black wings, and Akila takes off her headset and runs dizzily over. She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

This must be the taste of Language— the tongue mapped by many colors, parsed by the vowels of memory, the roof of the mouth the dome of a world circumscribed by consonants, whose edges suggest the sour-sweetness of oranges, the bittermelon’s green rind, the river- scent of mangoes all the way to the grove.

In retrospect, I see that this was my education., the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who'd deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

This is something I love about native southerners—a hello includes more personal information than a Yankee would parse out in an hour. Actually, the hello often doesn’t include the word hello.

Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.

The great breakthrough of our age is supposed to be that we measure success by happiness, admiring a man for how much he enjoyed his life, rather than how much wealth or fame he hoarded, that old race with no finish line. Diogenes with his barrel and his sunlight lived every hour of his life content, while Alexander fought and bled, mourned friends, faced enemies, and died unsatisfied. Diogenes is greater. Or does that past-tainted inner part of you—the part that still parses ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘he’ and ‘she’—still think that happiness alone is not achievement without legacy? Diogenes has a legacy. Diogenes ruled nothing, wrote nothing, taught nothing except by the example of his life to passersby, but, so impressed were those bypassers, that, after the better part of three millennia, we still know this about him.

In addition to helping the girls parse the world, and all its awful truths - time only goes one way, things end, affections wax and wane - I was the sole distributor of the strongest currency they would ever know: maternal love.

I am not a well educated man except that I have educated myself, and, because I have educated myself, what I say will not stand up, for lack of recognized authority. This in turn leaves me free to say what I will, in the hope that, like those small forces that do not threaten empires and are thus not fully pursued, the things in which I believe can survive in some high and forgotten place until the power of empire subsides. And although I know that few will listen to or credit this, I think we are in a lost age, in which holiness and charity have been traded for the victory and penetration of knowledge, though all the knowledge in the world has not brought us any further than where we can go without it even in the outermost halls of grace. I believe that more is to be known and apprehended from the beauty of a face than in delving, no matter how deep, simply into how things work, no matter how marvelous that may be. The greatest substance of the world is immaterial, the province of the heart, and its study cannot be forced or reasoned. Merely to touch upon the edge of things in parsing their mechanics is to forswear their fullness, for the entry to this fullness lies not in science but in art. I cannot prove this, for it cannot be proven, but I claim, assert, and have seen it.

No longer can we parse our fellow humans into the categories of ‘lovable’ and ‘unlovable.’ If love is an act of the will — not motivated by need, not measuring worth, not requiring reciprocity — then there is no such category as ‘unlovable.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

It was a rebus of heartbreak, misfortune a dog could parse.

parts:

books speak the truth our mouths are too afraid to voice, our minds too cluttered to parse out.

Paul had the impression he often had in the United Kingdom, of having just been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn't tell if the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity.

...I had also parsed that there was something powerful about blondness, thinness, flatness, and gaps between thighs. And that power was the context against which all others defined themselves... beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preference that reproduce the existing social order.

In advising the heads of state to learn from tragedy rather than perpetuate its existence Robert Kennedy excalimed, "Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live." We have a tendency to dwell on tragedy and use it as a justification for tragic occurrences that follow,rather than parse the tragedy, taking from it important lessons and using those lessons to avoid similar tragedies.

I was brought up in southern Massachusetts, where it was thought that mythology was a subject that we should all grasp. It was very much a part of my education. The easiest way to parse the world is through mythology.

She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.

Ours is a time of space telescopes, electron microscopes, supercomputers, and the worldwide web. This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers. Rev. Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution!

No, sir,” Wyatt insisted. “There can’t be one law for rich Texans and another law for broke Texans, and another law for Negroes, and another one for Chinamen, and squaws, and Irishmen, and whores, and another one for everybody else. I can’t parse it that way, Dog! I am not that smart! There’s got to be one law for everybody, or I can’t do this job. You want my badge or not?

I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as “Intelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental.” A 60 percent (or whatever) “heritability” for intelligence means no such thing. We shall not get this issue straight until we realize that the “interactionism” we all accept does not permit such statements as “Trait x is 29 percent environmental and 71 percent genetic.” When causative factors (more than two, by the way) interact so complexly, and throughout growth, to produce an intricate adult being, we cannot, in principle, parse that being’s behavior into quantitative percentages of remote root causes. The adult being is an emergent entity who must be understood at his own level and in his own totality. The truly salient issues are malleability and flexibility, not fallacious parsing by percentages. A trait may be 90 percent heritable, yet entirely malleable.

Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up Protestant schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.

While words take time to utter and hear, and require attention to parse their meaning, the impact of the image is instantaneous, its influence decadent. Before the primacy of the image, a salesman or an advertisement would have to describe the attributes of a product in a rational appeal to the intellect. Afterward, it was the mythology of the brand, usually concocted by psychologists, that would sway a consumer’s heart. Likewise, with the rise of the image in politics, the policy platform of a presidential candidate would come to matter less than the ability of his image to convey ineffable or irrelevant values. Though

At that word, Fates, her eyes flashed. She was a goddess of argument, born from the bright, relentless mind of Zeus. If she was forbidden something, even by the three gray goddesses themselves, she would not simply submit. She would set about parsing the constraint down to its atoms, and try to eke a way through.

A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general description, a Biker.

The Massachusetts elite had read everything in sight, some of it too closely. As would be said of logic-loving Ipswich minister John Wise, those men were not so much the masters as the victims of learning. They had read and reread bushels of witchcraft texts. They parsed legal code. They knew their history. They worked in the sterling name of reason.

The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they become to engage in reasoned political debate. Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: 'Speaking as an X' . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, 'Speaking as an gay Asian, I fell incompetent to judge on this matter'). It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, 'I think A, and here is my argument', now take the form, 'Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B'. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one "epistemology", black women have another. So what remains to be said? What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck in the world of archaic religion. Only those with an approved identity status are, like shamans, allowed to speak on certain matters. Particular groups -- today the transgendered -- are given temporary totemic significance. Scapegoats -- today conservative political speakers -- are duly designated and run off campus in a purging ritual. Propositions become pure or impure, not true or false. And not only propositions but simple words. Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up Protestant schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.

I just think it’s odd how we parse out our empathy,” he said. “Why we only have empathy for those who remind us most of ourselves. I’m not saying I don’t understand it. Sure, it’s easy to have empathy for someone who’s just like us. It comes naturally. I just think it’s a shame we can’t take it a bit further. I can’t help wondering what the world would be like if our empathy muscle were a bit more developed.

Americans, whether armed or not, were still looking everywhere but at social class when parsing the texture of their lives. It wasn’t so much that stressed-out blue-collar folks were clinging bitterly to their guns and religion, as Barack Obama had posited while running for president. It was more that guns and religion were keeping them from feeling bitter about the indignities inflicted on the middle class.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You’re always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It’s the next logical step. Oh, but you can’t. There’s something in the way. And it’s fighting back.

The earth was quiet around him, but alive. He felt it through the soles of his feet when he walked. The vibrancy of the forest streamed into him, strengthening him. But there was less of it than there should be. The world had changed, and was still changing. It was being tamed, losing its feral wildness and strength. Alongside it, his power was dimming as well. He was still unmatched, but there were blind spots in his communion with the earth, and those blind spots were growing, shutting him off bit by bit, reducing him. The realms of men were expanding, scouring the earth, parsing it into meaningless plots and fields, breaking up the magic polarities of the wilderness... That which made him so powerful, his connection to the earth, was also becoming his only weakness. In a cold rage, he walked. As he passed, the trees spoke to him, but even the woodsy voices of the naiads and the dryads was dimming. Their echo was confused and broken, divided.

Twelve years and four months after it began, the Thousand-Year Reich had ended. Humanity would require decades, perhaps centuries, to parse the regime’s inhumanity, and to comprehend how a narcissistic beerhall demagogue had wrecked a nation, a continent, and nearly a world. “Never in history has such ruination—physical and moral—been associated with the name of one man, the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times,” wrote Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw.

In order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it. It is not even enough to feel, to be moved in a vague way: it is essential to discern the different shades of feeling.” Taste goes beyond superficial observation, beyond identifying something as “cool.” Taste requires experiencing the creation in its entirety and evaluating one’s own authentic emotional response to it, parsing its effect. (Taste is not passive; it requires effort.)

If we can break the code on what the word ‘Hagalaz’ meant to him, maybe we’ll have a lead. Nobody with the surname, so forget that. The anagram parsing leads nowhere. In fact, there is no known seven-letter anagram of the word. Or six letters. Now, there are some meanings of the word out there. It’s a Norse rune. The ninth rune in the twenty-four letter magical Norse alphabet. Its meaning is, to me, difficult to understand. Best I can decipher is, ‘Don’t try to fix what we should break before it breaks us.’” That got Pack’s attention.

When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently; the worldviews that ultimately arose were the end result of that divergence. Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose. —

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it... Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own “hand waving” explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other’s. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other’s. How could she care for the other if she can’t even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Self-absorption kills empathy.” The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings.

So accustomed have male media leaders become to the wealth and decision-making power they command they just can't parse the notion of equality between the sexes. They have never understood the world feminists actually envision, in which women and men share equal educational, economic, and professional opportunities, live free of abuse, can be fully sexual without judgment or coercion, and where girls and boys alike can embrace their authentic selves because no one will be told that strength, tenderness, confidence, empathy, or aggression is "inappropriate" for their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or physical ability.

The wires noted how all four Beatles attended Bob Dylan’s Royal Festival Hall appearance, captured by D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back documentary. Dylan’s recent Bringing It All Back Home featured a side of electric rock, and this would be his last acoustic-only tour. Convulsed over Dylan’s identity, his British audience parsed every lyric, mistrusting his flirtation with rock ’n’ roll more for its flight from literary pretense than inexplicable lack of explicit social protest. The Beatles’ attendance conferred royal approval of Dylan’s vexing persona, whichever guise it took. With the publication of Lennon’s second book, A Spaniard in the Works, the Dylan rivalry intensified. Spaniard was both hastier than its predecessor and more ambitious, with more wordplay by the pound.

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It open you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don't know what's under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new. This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a child - why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns that patters of living. Ever second has value. But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what's next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand. But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I'm in a new place, I don't know what's next, even if I've read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends. I can't know a smell until I've smelled it. I can't know the feeling of a New York street until I've walked it. I can't feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I can't smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee. Not until I go and know it in its wholeness. But once I do, that awakened brain I had as a kid, with wide eyes and hands touching everything, comes right back. This brain absorbs the new world with gusto. And on top of that, it observes itself. It watches the self and parses out old reasons and motives. The observation is wide. Healing is mixed in.

They don’t rely on memorized conversational scripts, and they don’t have to carefully parse every single piece of data they encounter to make sense of it. They can wing it. Autistic people, on the flip side, don’t rely on knee-jerk assumptions or quick mental shortcuts to make our decisions. We process each element of our environment separately, and intentionally, taking very little for granted. If we’ve never been in a particular restaurant before, we may be slow to make sense of its layout or figure out how ordering works. We’ll need really clear-cut indications of whether it’s the kind of place where you sit down and get table service, or if you’re supposed to go to a counter to ask for what you like. (Many of us try to camouflage this fact by doing extensive research on a restaurant before setting foot inside.) Every single light, laugh, and smell in the place is taken in individually by our sensory system, rather than blended into a cohesive whole.

Every week Dr. Stein asked, “What do you see out the window?” Her stylus was never on camera, but Nedda could hear it sliding across a tablet. It was difficult to explain what she saw, harder still to parse its meaning. Space between stars made for easy misery, contemplating how small you were when faced with the universe. Though he was mission commander, Amit Singh looked out as little as possible, preferring star maps, feeds from the telescopes, and data from the probes and terraformers. He remained intent on viewing himself as a person and not a single cell in an organism the size of the universe. Nedda liked feeling small. “Endless space is endless potential,” she’d told Dr. Stein. It was good to sound hopeful. It was trickier to explain that she was looking for light, picking it apart, trying to sense the different wavelengths, searching for the familiar. There was light in the black, on its way to and from distant planets, light from stars crashing into one another, meeting in the space between. Light carried thoughts and hopes, the essence of what made everyone.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick. Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived. Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness. Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.