Somebody Who Already Knows

You can tell when someone in a room is about to cry. Not from anything they’ve said. Something in the breathing, a stillness that arrived a beat too early, the angle at which they’re holding their face. You knew before you knew you knew. There are books about this — acting manuals, clinical guides, shelves of ethnography. None of them are frauds. They just don’t do the thing. A surgical attending cannot hand a fellow the feel of a tissue plane by describing it. She knows she can’t; that is why the fellowship takes years rather than an afternoon. The knowledge isn’t secret. It has been described a thousand times. Description isn’t the channel it travels through. Meanwhile, a machine trained on everything anyone has ever typed knows the Hittite kings in order. It knows the grammar of languages with four living speakers, the tail end of the tuberculosis literature, the rules of games nobody has played since the war. So the rare things are easy for it and the universal things are hard,…