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The Work of Being Believed · Philosopheasy Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: You are typing a message to someone you trust,
0:03
SPEAKER_00: describing a bad week,
0:05
SPEAKER_00: and you keep deleting the same sentence,
0:07
SPEAKER_00: not because it isn't true, because it doesn't sound bad enough.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: You write,
0:13
SPEAKER_00: I've been really struggling,
0:15
SPEAKER_00: and it looks thin on the screen,
0:17
SPEAKER_00: so you add detail,
0:19
SPEAKER_00: the sleep,
0:19
SPEAKER_00: the specific Tuesday,
0:21
SPEAKER_00: the thing your manager said,
0:23
SPEAKER_00: building a case the way a lawyer builds a case except the defendant and
0:27
SPEAKER_00: the plaintiff are both you.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: By the time you hit send,
0:31
SPEAKER_00: you've spent more energy proving the suffering happened than you spent surviving it.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: That gap is the subject of this one.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: Not the pain itself, the labor of getting it believed.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: There's a French philosopher who spent almost no time on suffering in the ordinary sense.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: The kind that has a cause, an end date, a name you can say out loud like grief or a broken bone.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: Simone Weil was interested in something narrower and much worse.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: She called it malheur.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Usually translated as affliction, though the word undersells it.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: Affliction, in her account, has three things happening at once.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: There's the physical fact of the pain,
1:16
SPEAKER_00: there's the psychological erosion,
1:19
SPEAKER_00: the way it starts rewriting how you see yourself quietly from the inside.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: And there's a third layer she insisted was the actual mechanism of destruction, the social one.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: Affliction is suffering that has been stripped of its witnesses.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: Weil thought this third layer wasn't a side effect.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: It was the engine.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: A person in physical pain,
1:42
SPEAKER_00: surrounded by people who see the pain and respond to it, is suffering.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: But she doesn't degrade the way a person in identical pain does
1:51
SPEAKER_00: when nobody around them registers it as real.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: Here's the mechanism, stated plainly.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: A human self is partly built out of confirmation, not approval.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: Confirmation.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: The basic sense that what is happening to you is in fact happening.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: Remove that confirmation long enough, And the self doesn't just feel unseen.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: It starts to doubt its own report.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: This is why affliction for a while corrodes faster than pain.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: Pain has an object.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: Affliction has an object plus a rumor that the object might not be real
2:26
SPEAKER_00: because nobody else has agreed to look at it.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: And this is where her more radical claim comes in.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: The one that made her strange even among people who admired her.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: Well thought that genuinely attending to another person's affliction is one of
2:42
SPEAKER_00: the rarest acts a human being can perform.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: Not because people are cruel.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Because affliction is, in her word, repulsive.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: It resembles a kind of contagion.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: Something in an onlooker instinctively pulls back from a person
2:57
SPEAKER_00: whose suffering has no clean cause and no expiration date.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: The way you'd flinch from touching something that might still be live.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: So the sufferer learns...
3:07
SPEAKER_00: Fast what the room can tolerate and starts editing the report accordingly.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: Which brings us back to the message you were drafting.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: You weren't lying in that message.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: You were performing a specific exhausting kind of labor.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Pre-justification.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: Building the exhaustion into a shape sturdy enough to survive another person's first flinch.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: You rehearsed the version where the story holds together.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: You cut the parts that sound like self-pity.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: You added the parts that sound like evidence.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: Consider the version of this that happens at a doctor's office.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: You've had the symptom for weeks.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, somewhere in your body that something is wrong.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: But you also know,
3:52
SPEAKER_00: because you've done this before,
3:53
SPEAKER_00: that vague reports get vague treatment,
3:56
SPEAKER_00: so you spend the car ride rehearsing how to say it.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: Ranking symptoms by how credible they sound rather than how much they hurt.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: Deciding before you've even opened your mouth which true things to leave out
4:09
SPEAKER_00: because they'll make the whole account sound less believable.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: That rehearsal is not paranoia.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: It is a completely rational response to a fact you've learned the hard way
4:20
SPEAKER_00: that your account of your own experience does not become fully real
4:23
SPEAKER_00: until someone else agrees to receive it.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: This is the same architecture Monday's piece walked through, from a different angle entirely.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: Ludwig Fleck was writing about facts,
4:35
SPEAKER_00: scientific ones, the kind that feel objective and settled.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: And his claim was that a fact doesn't become a fact by existing.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: It becomes a fact once a thought collective agrees to treat it as stable,
4:48
SPEAKER_00: suitable, real, before that collective sanction.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: An observation is just a private impression, floating, unconfirmed.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: Weill is describing the exact same mechanism Except the fact in question is your own pain.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't fully exist.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: Not socially.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: Not even fully to you until someone else's attention ratifies it.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: Until then it sits in the same unstable category as an unconfirmed observation.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: True, maybe,
5:22
SPEAKER_00: but not yet real in the way that changes how anyone,
5:24
SPEAKER_00: including you, is allowed to act.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: This is why the weighting itself has a cost.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: Not the suffering, the waiting for it to be authorized.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: You can watch this happen to people in real time if you know what you're looking for.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: Someone mentions,
5:40
SPEAKER_00: almost as an aside, something serious that's been happening to them for months.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: They deliver it flatly, almost apologetically.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: As if lowering the emotional temperature in advance will improve the odds
5:52
SPEAKER_00: that you'll actually hear it,
5:54
SPEAKER_00: rather than performing the social reflex of concern and moving on.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: That flatness is not numbness.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: It is calibration.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: It is a person who has learned,
6:05
SPEAKER_00: through repetition,
6:07
SPEAKER_00: exactly how much of their real experience the room can absorb before it looks away.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: Will would say something has already gone wrong by that point, not because the person is broken.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: Because the attention they needed,
6:21
SPEAKER_00: the rare,
6:22
SPEAKER_00: specific,
6:23
SPEAKER_00: undivided kind,
6:25
SPEAKER_00: never arrived And so the affliction has started doing its other work.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: The quieter work.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: The kind that convinces you eventually that the thing happening
6:35
SPEAKER_00: to you was never quite as bad as you remember,
6:38
SPEAKER_00: because if it had been, surely someone would have looked up.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: So here is where the frame leaves us.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: Exactly where Weill left it unfinished in her own writing.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: If genuine attention is as rare as she claims, So the question was this.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: If unwitnessed affliction just dissolves into a report nobody ratifies,
7:24
SPEAKER_00: into something that never quite becomes real,
7:27
SPEAKER_00: or if there is a move available before anyone else's attention shows up at all.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Weil's answer is not comforting, but it is precise.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: Affliction does not fully resolve without another person's gaze.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: She is clear about that.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: No amount of private effort substitutes for a witness
7:47
SPEAKER_00: who actually receives what happened to you.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: But she does identify one thing that can happen before the witness arrives,
7:54
SPEAKER_00: and it is smaller than people want it to be, and more demanding than it sounds.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: It is this, attending to your own affliction without editing it for an imagined audience.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: Go back to Fleck for a second, because this is where the frame locks together.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: A fact, in his account,
8:12
SPEAKER_00: requires a thought collective,
8:15
SPEAKER_00: a minimum of two people willing to treat an observation as stable,
8:20
SPEAKER_00: You cannot manufacture that alone,
8:22
SPEAKER_00: but you can behave privately as the first honest member of that eventual collective.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: Which means recording what happened to you the way it actually happened,
8:33
SPEAKER_00: not the way it will sound acceptable later.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: This is different from journaling as therapy.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: It is closer to evidence-keeping,
8:41
SPEAKER_00: except the evidence is being kept for a jury of one,
8:44
SPEAKER_00: and that juror is you,
8:46
SPEAKER_00: And you are under the same pressure to soften the account that you'd feel in front
8:50
SPEAKER_00: of a stranger.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: Picture the difference between two entries in the same notebook, describing the same afternoon.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: One says had a rough day, probably overreacting.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: The other says,
9:02
SPEAKER_00: plainly,
9:03
SPEAKER_00: what was said,
9:04
SPEAKER_00: what time it happened,
9:06
SPEAKER_00: what your body did in response, with nothing rounded down for palatability.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: The first entry is already affliction managing itself for an audience
9:15
SPEAKER_00: that isn't even in the room yet.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: The second entry names the shaking hands the 4 a.m. Wake up, the exact sentence that was said.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: The details a softened account would have sanded off.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: She would say the difference matters because affliction's deepest damage is not the pain.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: It is the slow agreement you start making with yourself
9:37
SPEAKER_00: that your own report was probably exaggerated.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: Undistorted attention,
9:42
SPEAKER_00: applied to yourself first,
9:44
SPEAKER_00: is the one lever available before any outside witness exists.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't dissolve the affliction.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: There is a second piece of Fleck's model that Monday's piece didn't need yet,
9:54
SPEAKER_00: and it changes what finding a witness actually means.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: Fleck didn't think a thought collective was one undifferentiated crowd,
10:03
SPEAKER_00: all equally capable of ratifying a fact.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: He split it into two rings.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: There's an esoteric circle,
10:10
SPEAKER_00: The small number of people equipped,
10:12
SPEAKER_00: trained, invested enough to actually test and confirm an observation.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: And there's an exoteric circle around it.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Everyone else who receives the facts secondhand already finished and mostly just nods along.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: Here's why that distinction matters for you,
10:29
SPEAKER_00: specifically at two in the morning, deciding who to send the message to.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Not every person in your life belongs to your esoteric circle.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: Most of them structurally can't.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: They don't have the context,
10:42
SPEAKER_00: the patience,
10:43
SPEAKER_00: or in some cases the stability to actually test your account against anything.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: They can only receive it politely, the way you receive a stranger's weather report.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: Nod, sympathize, move on, whilst flinch.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: The instinctive pulling away from affliction she wrote about isn't a moral failure
11:01
SPEAKER_00: in those people.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: It's the friend who changes the subject after your first sentence.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: Or answers with a story about their own bad week instead of a question about yours.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: You handed a raw, untested observation to someone built only to receive finished ones.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: Which means the exhausting part of your rehearsal,
11:22
SPEAKER_00: the endless pre-justifying, might be aimed at the wrong ring entirely.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: Think about the last time you told the story to three different people
11:30
SPEAKER_00: and got three different qualities of response.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: One of them asked a real question.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: Pushed on a detail.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: Remembered something you'd said weeks earlier.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: Treated the account as something worth examining rather than something to simply receive.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: That person was operating briefly as your esoteric circle.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: The other two were kind.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: Neither was ratifying anything.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: You already knew this instinctively.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Which is exactly why you kept a mental list of who gets the real version and
12:01
SPEAKER_00: who gets the rounded down one.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: The discipline Weil is describing starts
12:06
SPEAKER_00: to look less like broadcasting your affliction wider and more like locating the one
12:11
SPEAKER_00: or two people actually capable of testing it.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: There's a passage where Weil describes attention as something closer to a discipline
12:19
SPEAKER_00: than a feeling.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: She compares real attention to the kind a student gives a difficult problem,
12:25
SPEAKER_00: not straining toward an answer,
12:27
SPEAKER_00: but simply staying present to the thing without looking away.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: Because most of what passes for support from even the well-meaning people
12:39
SPEAKER_00: in your exoteric circle is actually a form of looking away disguised as concern.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: Reassurance is a form of looking away.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: So is advice, delivered too early.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: So is the reflex to fix,
12:53
SPEAKER_00: minimize, or relate your story back to something that happened to them once.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: Well thought all three of those moves,
13:00
SPEAKER_00: reassurance, advice,
13:01
SPEAKER_00: redirection,
13:03
SPEAKER_00: were ways of managing the discomfort affliction produces in the witness rather
13:07
SPEAKER_00: than actually receiving what the afflicted person said.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: The listener converts your raw account into something manageable,
13:15
SPEAKER_00: something with a next step attached because the unmanaged version is harder
13:19
SPEAKER_00: to sit inside.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: Which means part of what you're actually asking for when you rehearsed the message
13:25
SPEAKER_00: for the fourth time It's someone willing to not solve it yet.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: Most people,
13:33
SPEAKER_00: including good ones,
13:34
SPEAKER_00: don't know how to fulfill that request,
13:37
SPEAKER_00: because nobody trained them to distinguish attention from advice.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: So here's the shift in the prescription.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: You've located who might be capable of it, the esoteric one or two.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: Now there's a second move.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: Smaller,
13:51
SPEAKER_00: almost procedural,
13:52
SPEAKER_00: and it's this,
13:53
SPEAKER_00: telling that person plainly what kind of listening you're asking for
13:57
SPEAKER_00: before you start.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: Not I need to vent, which primes someone to just wait it out politely.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: Something closer to.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: I don't need you to fix this or tell me it's not that bad.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: I need you to actually take in what I'm about to say.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: That sentence sounds almost absurdly direct.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: It is.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: And it changes what the listener does with their attention, because you've named the request.
14:23
SPEAKER_00: Weil couldn't name for you in advance.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: So what happens when the search comes up empty?
14:29
SPEAKER_00: No esoteric circle.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: No person capable of holding the raw account without converting it into advice or reassurance.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: Weil actually addresses this, and her answer is stranger than it first sounds.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: She writes about attention in a religious register.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: Some readers skip past.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: Because she connects it directly to prayer,
14:51
SPEAKER_00: but stripped the theology out,
14:53
SPEAKER_00: and what's left is a claim about where authority can come from
14:56
SPEAKER_00: when no human witness is available.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: She argues that the structure of the universe itself,
15:02
SPEAKER_00: or in her language,
15:03
SPEAKER_00: a kind of impersonal order, can function as a witness of last resort.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: Not because it responds to you,
15:11
SPEAKER_00: because it does not require your report to be palatable in order to be true.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: Here is the more usable version of that idea,
15:19
SPEAKER_00: translated out of her vocabulary and into Fleck's.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: Fleck said,
15:24
SPEAKER_00: a fact needs a thought collective,
15:26
SPEAKER_00: but he also noticed that individual scientists sometimes hold an observation
15:30
SPEAKER_00: for years before any collective exists to receive it.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: Kepler charting orbits nobody else believed yet.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: A researcher sitting on data that contradicts the field,
15:41
SPEAKER_00: waiting, sometimes for decades, for a collective willing to test it.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: That waiting period isn't nothing, it isn't failure either.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: It's a specific, definable state, a fact that is true and currently unratified.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: Not false.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Not imaginary.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: Unconfirmed.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: Which means there's a difference between your affliction not yet being witnessed
16:06
SPEAKER_00: and your affliction not being real,
16:08
SPEAKER_00: and that difference is worth holding onto with more discipline than it usually gets.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: Practically, this changes what the private record from earlier is actually for.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: It's not a placeholder until the real witness shows up.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: It's closer to Kepler's notebook,
16:24
SPEAKER_00: an account kept accurately enough that when a witness does arrive,
16:27
SPEAKER_00: whether that's next week or next year,
16:30
SPEAKER_00: there's something intact for them to actually examine.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: The dated entries still have to be legible, even if the hand that wrote them was shaking.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: Which is where the actual exercise for this week comes in,
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Because everything so far has been diagnosis,
16:46
SPEAKER_00: and Weil was insistent that attention is a practice,
16:50
SPEAKER_00: not a mood you either have or don't.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: The exercise is this.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: Once a day,
16:56
SPEAKER_00: for one week you write a single paragraph describing something that happened to you,
17:01
SPEAKER_00: a slight,
17:02
SPEAKER_00: a difficulty, a moment of strain using only what Fleck would call raw observation.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: No qualifiers that soften it for an imagined reader.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: No probably overreacting.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: No rounding down.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: Just what happened, what was said, what your buddy did, in the order it occurred.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: Then underneath it you write one separate sentence clearly marked apart from
17:25
SPEAKER_00: the account itself that names what kind of response it would need
17:29
SPEAKER_00: if someone else read it.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: Not I need to vent.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: Something closer to this needs to be believed as stated, not softened, not fixed.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: This is the request.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: Weil says most afflicted people never get to make explicitly because they've spent
17:47
SPEAKER_00: so long editing the account the request gets edited out along with it.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: You're not sending this to anyone yet.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: That's the part people want to skip.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: The paragraph exists first for the same reason.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: Kepler's notebook existed before anyone else would look at it,
18:05
SPEAKER_00: to keep the observation intact and dated,
18:08
SPEAKER_00: and specific enough to survive contact with an actual witness later,
18:12
SPEAKER_00: whenever that witness appears.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: By day four or five you'll start crossing out particular words,
18:18
SPEAKER_00: maybe a little, I guess, the moment before you'd have let them stand.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: Well, I would say that flinch you're preempting is not yours to manage.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: It belongs to the witness, if and when one arrives.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: There's one more thing worth noticing about that notebook,
18:34
SPEAKER_00: and it has to do with what happens to you...
18:37
SPEAKER_00: Specifically, across the week rather than what happens to the account.
18:41
SPEAKER_00: While never claimed the discipline of attention was comfortable to perform.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: She thought it was closer to a kind of asceticism.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: Something that costs the person doing it.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: Precisely because it refuses the relief of self-editing.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: Every time you write the raw version instead of the softened one,
18:59
SPEAKER_00: you are declining a small, immediate comfort.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: The comfort of making the story sound less serious than it was.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: Which is also,
19:07
SPEAKER_00: not incidentally, the comfort of not quite having to feel the size of it yourself.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: This is worth sitting with, because it reframes something from earlier in this piece.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: The pre-justification,
19:21
SPEAKER_00: the endless rehearsal,
19:22
SPEAKER_00: the rounding down,
19:24
SPEAKER_00: all of it looked, at first, like labor performed for an imagined audience.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: And it partly is.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: But there's a second function running underneath it, quieter.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: Flex scientists sitting on an unconfirmed observation,
20:01
SPEAKER_00: Has the comparative luxury of certainty about the data,
20:04
SPEAKER_00: even while the collective withholds belief.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: He knows what he saw.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: Your position is harder because affliction specifically targets that certainty first.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't just wait for a witness,
20:17
SPEAKER_00: it works on you while you wait,
20:18
SPEAKER_00: wearing down your own confidence in what you're reporting.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: So the discipline has to hold two things at once across the week ahead,
20:26
SPEAKER_00: keeping the account intact for whoever eventually reads it.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: Here is the version of the week ahead, stated plainly.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: Call it the unconfirmed observation log.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: Once a day.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: For the next seven days,
20:40
SPEAKER_00: take five minutes and write down one thing that happened to you exactly
20:43
SPEAKER_00: as it happened.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: No softening, no rounding down, no imagined reader to please.
20:50
SPEAKER_00: Underneath it,
20:51
SPEAKER_00: in a separate line,
20:53
SPEAKER_00: name what kind of response the account would actually require
20:57
SPEAKER_00: if someone else read it.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: Date it.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: Close the notebook.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: That's the whole practice.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: You are not performing this for anyone yet.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: You are keeping the record the way Kepler kept his accurate,
21:11
SPEAKER_00: dated, unconfirmed, and still true, regardless of who has agreed to look at it.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: By the end of the week, hold this question and don't rush to answer it.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: Which parts of your own account have you been softening,
21:26
SPEAKER_00: not for someone else's comfort, but for your own?