I was still wearing the clothes of the day before, I hadn’t had the strength to take them off.
Sonia looked at me smiling and poured me some juice.
Matt stared into my eyes with his full of affection and said,
"Today I’ll come visit you and maybe try to explain a thing or two more to make your life easier right? Valdes told me you were a little confused.”
And who wouldn’t be! I thought, but I told him that I would be grateful.
My head was empty and buzzing but I tried to pull myself together before going to work.
MATT’S TEACHING
Entering N Technology I said hello to Alice who was passing through Reception with a mountain of folders under her arm, She returned my good morning with her usual friendly smile.
I walked to Matt’s office where he was already standing waiting for me, leaning against the door. He walked ahead of me opening the door for me to the archives. He said,
"Go ahead, Sgrunfy is waiting for you, just give me a couple of minutes and I’ll join you."
I walked rather unenthusiastically along the corridor to Sgrunff’s classroom and I found him sitting at his desk with all four hands folded on the shiny mahogany surface. He was always waiting but he didn’t seem at all irritated by it and he greeted me with a slight nod of the head and a genuine smile. I didn’t smile but went closer to the desk, in the process spilling the entire contents of my bag. I started out with,
"My dear .... Sgrunfio," pausing before emphasizing the twisting of his name, assuming you can really manipulate such a name in the first place.
"I really do think you have chosen the wrong person for this work, I'm not up to it. And what's more I don’t care anything at all about any of it. I hope you’re not trying to turn me into some kind of religious fanatic? Have I ended up in some kind of a cult? A madhouse? I’m not going to do it! "
I crossed my arms over my chest like a sulky child. The effect was spoiled because this reminded me of Irina and I began to smile.
Sgrunff said very gently,
"My dear, no one wants to turn you into a religious fanatic of any kind. The purpose of the task that was assigned to you is something else entirely."
Matt came in, said hello and asked if he could intervene. He seemed to be very respectful of the role played by Sgrunff since it was clear that Matt was his superior.
He waited for the little four-handed dwarf who gave him his consent.
Sonia also came in to see what was going on. She looked at me and with an amused tone whispered:
"The five balls! I like this part!"
Matt began,
"As our friend has already explained, what you are being asked to do is to refine your ability to observe. In practice you have to attune your current skills to the next level, to a point where nothing escapes you.
The thing that will try to hinder you during this difficult journey will be just your thoughts.
Remember that thinking distorts your observation. Usually a person thinks while he is watching, or, as often happens, he thinks instead of observing. This is incorrect. The correct way to proceed is that first you look closely, after which the process of thinking can take place. You will find that after careful and honest observation your thoughts will be much cleaner and more logical.”
"But what am I supposed to observe, for what purpose, and what should I find ...?" was my question.
Sonia smiled and replied,
"Good question, my dear, and now what can you say to her?"
Matt smiled back and said,
"You have to look for the truth, you must be able to distinguish what is true from the false in the books that Sgrunfy gave you, just that."
I gave a somewhat hysterical giggle and said,
"Ah! Well! If that’s all! - lucky it’s only that! Who knows what I was expecting! Matt, how can I hope to succeed in something like that? Of course you realise the amount of work and study necessary just to find a small glimmer of‘the truth?’How can I do what millions of people over thousands of years have failed to do?”
But he just smiled again. It seemed like nothing I said affected his composure. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out five white balls, iridescent like the skin of a snake lit up by the moon. All of them were identical.
He held them in the palm of his hand and asked me,
"Could you tell me if one of these ball is heavier than the rest or if they are all the same weight, or the same shape?"
I looked at them and said, "Well, they all look alike to me."
"I agree with you. Now I'll give you one at a time so that you can check it out," he said, approaching me. He put the first ball into the palm of my hand.
I looked at it, hefted it and estimated the weight. It measured about two centimetres in diameter and I was aware it was very light.
He told me to put it on the table and asked,
"Do you think that the second ball is the same as the first?"
Yeah, I thought and I told him so.
He took the second ball between his fingers with difficulty. It seemed to be continually slipping.
"That one is heavier," I said.
He looked into my eyes, smiling,
"Well done!" And put the ball in my hand.
Immediately I realized it was identical to the previous one, but he told me to weigh it and check the two spheres keeping each one in a hand.
Damn it, I thought to myself - it’s a trick! They are exactly the same! I balanced each one in my hands on an imaginary set of scales, judging the weight. I said,
"You’ve tricked me!"
Before giving me the third ball he asked me if it weighed the same as the first two.
I said yes and in fact the weight seemed to be the same.
At the fourth ball it was still hard to pick up and again he asked me how I thought it would be.
"Same as the others," I said with a slight tone of defiance. I wasn’t going to fall for it again.
Sonia, who was watching the scene, smiled in amusement.
The ball was in fact exactly equal to the others, then Matt carelessly took the last ball and without giving him time to pose the question that I already knew was coming I asked,
"What did you want to prove with this trick?"
He dropped the fifth ball into the palm of my hand and my arm almost gave way under the weight. I had to be careful not to drop it.
"That was what I wanted to show you," he said.
I checked the last ball; it was perfectly equal to the others, the same colour and shape, same size, but definitely weighing so much more. Holding it in my palm, I could see the dimple underneath it.
"The core of that sphere is made from a different material from all the others; it only looks the same.”He went on,
"That ball is like a truth, when you come into contact with one you’ll know it’s a truth because even if it’s all dressed up as something else and not to be confused with anything else, its weight will be very different. It will be like a beacon in the night in the eyes of a skilled and trained observer. People are more used to jumping to hasty conclusions dictated by a logical association of thoughts than from mere observation of the facts.”
I listened carefully without losing a single syllable.
This is the second relative truth.
People do not observe carefully, they merely judge according to the conclusions or the indications of others, without first verifying them directly.
Do not blindly believe your eyes: the eyes see only in a limited way.
"If you ask a man what he sees when he looks up towards the sky on a clear summer night, he will tell you that he sees thousands of stars. But is that really what you see? What do you see Kate? "
Obviously‘the stars’was the wrong answer and so I tried with“bright dots?”
"That's right! I see that you have understood where I wanted to get to. He concluded by saying,
"The last piece of advice that I give you today is
- think simple!”
They both smiled. That ball had surprised me and those two had me fooled.
Sonia and Matt left me and I was alone with my teacher. The last thing they said to me that day came from Sonia.
"Ask any questions to our Sgrunfy, he’s the most skilled teacher I know."
Sgrunff looked satisfied. He liked the compliment.
A READING LESSON
We began to discuss how to move this titanic undertaking forwards. Although the explanations Matt gave had had an effect on me, I still felt that the whole thing was impossible.
Sgrunff didn’t lose heart however. To be exact he hardly batted an eyelid and just launched into an explanation of how to proceed.
He lit up the wall screen and a page appeared full of writing. He said,
"Now I’m going to try and explain to you what you must do not to read this page.”
"Not to read it?"
"Of course, Kate, come on, start reading," he giggled away happily.
"Look Sgrunfio, do I have to read it or not?" I retorted.
He corrected me once again "Sgrunff, my name is Sgrunff!"
"Okay, okay Sgrunfio, then what do you want me to do?"
He chuckled under his walrus mustache but didn’t seem at all offended. Deep down I felt that it amused him.
He told me to read aloud what I saw written on the screen.
It was a children’s fairy tale that I read out loud in a strong voice. I stopped and asked him what‘princisbecco’was. He said,
“It’s a low-value alloy which is very shiny with a colour that gave a surprising replication of gold. It owes its name to its creator, an Englishman watchmaker named Christopher Pinchbeck and from it we derived the term‘princisbecco’that means‘surprising’or‘dumbfounded.’
He moved on,
"Among your books there are a couple that have a small white triangle in the top left corner. Those are dictionaries.”
He changed the page to be read and said,
"Read it in your mind this time."
Once I had finished reading it he wondered what difference there was between reading aloud and reading in your head. I told him I didn’t believe there was any difference.
“Kate,”he said,“you are a real genius, it’s just a pity that you didn’t observe what you are doing.”
He laughed out loud then and told me to pay more attention to what occurred during the reading process.
I listened to him and re-read a few pages out loud and other pages mentally.
He asked the same question as before, but this time I had some answers.
"When reading aloud I tend to be careful about how I pronounce the words. I try not to make mistakes and try to give a certain inflection in reading. When I read mentally however, I try to imagine the scenes and I think about the story I’m telling."
I went on saying,
"Reading aloud is much slower than reading in your head. Perhaps reading mentally allows me to reach a greater understanding of the subject matter?”
“Very good Kate!”he exclaimed,“You’re beginning to understand.”
He brought up on the screen around ten random pages taken from different childrens’books. These were used as a neutral field for the exercise.
He asked me to read the first page from the left - mentally.
After that page he asked me to read the second and the third superficially and to get to the last pages by simply sliding my vision across the words.
I did and I asked him what the exercise was for since I had not in the least understood what the last few pages were about.
“Exactly,”he replied.“You’re trying to understand what the written pages can convey to you. Why do you do that?”
I answered that question slightly sarcastically.
"To understand what is written ... dear Sgrunfio.”
He was amused and asked,
"And what exactly are you trying to figure out? We are reading pages of tales for children, it is just a harmless pastime. Tell me, what attracts your curiosity in that way?
I really did not know what to say but I gave him an answer that mademe laugh too.
"It’ll be my thirst for knowledge that pushes me in an effort to understand everything."
He made only two pages appear on the screen telling me to read the first mentally. I diligently obeyed.
He asked me if I was mentally repeating the words read. As if I were reading aloud, but without saying a word.
I told him yes and he asked me to try to read the next page without repeating the text mentally, without trying to associate a picture to those symbols. This was a rather more significant fishing into the archives of the mind.
I did it. My eyes became fixed and immovable, intently watching those symbols without trying to snatch the meaning.
I told him that I had done as he had requested, but I didn’t understand what was written.
Sgrunff explained to me that what I should do, at least for the moment, was to look for certain keywords, words that attracted my attention.
"What are the key words?" I asked.
He told me that for the time being we should consider as a keyword every word that attracted my attention.
"How do I recognize the keywords?' I asked curiously.
He ran ten more pages up on the screen and asked me to read with my eyes, saying them aloud only when a page was over and when I was about to read the second.
First page read, I start the second, on to the third. At the fifth page I looked down at my blouse and said,
"Where’s the mark?"
He asked me what I was talking about and I told him that on the fifth page it was written‘Kate has a large stain on her blouse.’
He asked me how I could read such a thing since I was not reading but just sliding my vision over the page.
I pointed out that it was written on the thirteenth line of the fifth page…..
He interrupted me.
"Yes, I know what it says but how did you know it ?"
"Well," I said, "it says‘Kate’” ….
"Keyword," he nodded, "You have just come across a word that has aroused your curiosity. It’s as if you have turned on a small light warning. Don’t think, observe. Whenever you meet one, pause a moment to see if at that point you find something interesting, otherwise continue.”
He had me read the other pages, making sure that I spoke out loud the different words that struck me, explaining that this time the argument was different.
"Every time you meet one of those words, stop a moment, notify me of the word and continue with your reading."
After this I began to scroll through the pages.
I spotted twenty-two keywords, one of which I did not know the meaning of. Sgrunff told me it was important that every time I found one I should not hesitate to use the dictionary.
He ran another ten pages, and this time he told me to read from the bottom up, explaining that it was not important for the purposes of our exercise to understand what was written.
I did and I spotted the keywords on the pages.
"Well, Kate, now you can start your homework. All you need to do is to find a keyword, copy the word or piece of text that concerns it and paste it on the blank pages at your disposal."
He gave me a list of keywords that could help me in the search, explaining that those words were nothing more than the specific key words of the argument. He went on to explain that any other words I could add myself.
He finished by saying that for the moment I should refine this way of reading and we would subsequently pass on to analyzing the material collected, effectively putting into practice the advice that Matt had given me.
THE READING
I put everything that had fallen out of the bag back in. I had the feeling that despite all maybe I could do something - the work was definitely going to be long and arduous but I would not have thought to do it in the way Sgrunff described.
Once back home and after eati
ng the snack Serena had prepared, I went to work.
I started by turning on a book and prepared a table in which I entered the title and author of the work and began to scroll through the text.
Whenever I met a keyword I copied the whole phrase containing the word into the box inherent to that title, scrolling the words with the special pen that Sgrunff had given me. I wanted to see if I could remember how it worked. Let's see - Click, light green to highlight. Click, light yellow to copy and blue for copy.
I continued to work throughout the night, until hunger pangs drove me into the kitchen. The clock on the wall ticked on past 5.20. I wasn’t sleepy, just hungry.
I saw the fruit tray and smiled in remembrance of the two bananas I had eaten the first time I found myself in that place. I ate a little fruit and went curiously to the refrigerator.
With a full stomach, I returned to my apartment, eager to read more.
When I looked up from my work the sun was already high in the sky. I had not slept, but sleeping at that time was out of the question in any case.
So I jumped into a refreshing shower and dropped by Serena who prepared a couple of sandwiches that I ate on the way to my office and in the process I managed to drop some crumbs of cocktail sauce right onto the front of my blouse.
I looked in the rearview mirror to see if I had done any more damage, but I only saw two weary eyes and a small stain on my chest.
I began to think I would be able to find a way to get through the reading but I would need some time and the material was really overwhelming and I was not sure how to balance work and education, if education was what it was all about.
Planet-H: The End of the Beginning Page 12
