I don’t know if you have noticed the disproportion with which we usually respond to a complex question that we adopt lightly and pronounce as a greeting. Some apps for learning English warn that you should never ask “How are you?” if you don’t want to seem like a bumpkin or a tourist. On the other hand, Gueorgui Gospodinov in Physics of Sadness (Impedimenta) – an unpredictable and delightful read – confesses that the phrase gives him phobia and that he is amazed by its persistence, as he does not understand how “this hypocritical question” has managed to survive.
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“Fine,” we say mechanically, or “getting by,” indicating that things are going okay but much better than those who only have the weary “hanging in there” left. Gospodinov highlights the sincerity that emerges among teenagers who bluntly declare they are “dead bored,” proof of their intermittent frustration. More than once, to “how are you?” we should answer that “we are not,” because, although we stand on the ground, we are tangled in the clouds of worry, absent and confused, as was said in villages when someone could not respond logically.
It is customary to affirm with emotion “one hundred percent,” as if accounting were the only reliable thing
The uses of time have shaped dynamics in which education challenges care. The need to agree on any matter is so great that it seems common to justify agreement by loading it with digits. Instead of saying “I agree,” or “I think the same,” it is customary to affirm with emotion “one hundred percent,” as if accounting were the only reliable thing in times when opinion is the tick of information. I think of absolute colors, white or black, and not even these are one hundred percent white or black because traces of magenta or yellow can filter into the beam of light.
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On what could you and I be one hundred percent in agreement beyond Newton’s law or Archimedes’ principle? It would be more realistic to cut percentages short, and like judges debating the moral pressure on Begoña Gómez or the application of amnesty, we would resort to the “sni” of the people of Jerez: neither yes nor no in the same word. Or, isn’t it enough to be one third in agreement? In our search for the absolute, we lose nuance and sweep away the corner of doubt because almost nothing is entirely right or entirely wrong. It is, and that is already a triumph.
