His silences were enough like my father’s to fill me with grave anticipation. But he himself was completely different–as thin as my father was fat, as deferential as my father was overbearing, as open to new ideas as my father was closed to them.
–Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty. Not the best prose in the book so far–which I’m very much enjoying–but I like that he draws out this familiar connection between deference and intellectual openness. We seem to understand that an overbearing person is likely to be unwilling to consider new ideas, but for some reason we don’t work the equation the other way and acknowledge that deferential and/or reverential casts of mind are often so willing to engage with and be reshaped by intellectual challengers.