Diana closed her eyes. What a shame that the senses could not be more deliberate. The centres of auditory processing and speech recognition, so adept at screening out the irrelevant and the nonsensical, could do so little to obstruct bullshit. The mind was insufficiently selective. It would be better if stupidity and intelligence were mutually invisible, passing through one another like waves at different frequencies, different spectra. No need for politeness, no need to justify oneself, no more deference to the commonplace. Just solitude. The pandemonium of incorrectness and everywhere half-truth and agreed-upon-falsehood, the ocean of lesser waves, would appear only as a turbulent, benign silence.
Fray Luis de León, the great humanist scholar of the Spanish Golden Age, one of the sages of Salamanca University, was condemned by the Inquisition for translating the Song of Solomon and spent four years in prison before being allowed to return to his lectern, where he began his first lecture with the phrase, "Decíamos ayer": "As we were saying yesterday..."