In the past, my goal in conversation had been to accurately represent the things that I thought, and to deploy these thoughts in relation to the things that other people said, while exercising caution to not betray ignorant or antisocial ideas, and the whole thing had been so much to think about that in the end I usually hadn’t said anything at all. Svetlana had pointed out that, if I actually listened to other people, instead of worrying so much about what I was going to say, I would notice that everyone was saying all kinds of antisocial, ignorant, or irrelevant things, which were often just
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