His silences were enough like my father\u2019s to fill me with grave anticipation. But he himself was completely different\u2013as 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.<\/span> His silences were enough like my father\u2019s to fill me with grave anticipation. But he himself was completely different\u2013as 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.\u2013Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty. Not the best prose in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
\u2013Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty<\/span>. Not the best prose in the book so far\u2013which I\u2019m very much enjoying\u2013but 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"