Talking to Strangers

What is required of us is restraint and humility.

cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t.

the terrible false jollity that comes at you from every side, braying about goodwill and peace and family fun, makes loneliness and depression particularly hard to bear.

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren’t living in villages anymore.

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.

If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.

Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?