It was spending the weekend in the company of his music and people who understood him that allowed me to understand him.
"Fictional characters allowed me to understand what was hard for me to understand (which, so far, has been nearly everything)," he writes.
One day at breakfast, while Ella ate her oatmeal and rambled on about her brother, I recognized in a humbling flash that she was doing exactly what I'd been doing as a writer all these years: the fictional characters in my books had allowed me to understand what was hard for me to understand (which, so far, has been nearly everything).
Re "The Disorder Is Sensory; the Diagnosis, Elusive" (June 5): As a teacher I attended workshops on Sensory Integration Dysfunction, and while I was never convinced that it should be labeled a disability, studying the "symptoms" allowed me to understand those children better and to help parents see them not as problem children, but as kids whose skills were still maturing.
Studying Mr. Khan's operations allowed me to understand the challenges of fighting Afghanistan's opium trade, which at once benefits the Taliban, Al Qaeda and corrupt officials in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.
But the explanations of the chief doctor of the clinic allowed me to understand hospitals are not the source of the risk," Mara said.
The trip had given me a flavour of the isolation and misery of Bunce Island, but it had also allowed me to understand something about the loneliness of what it means to sail upriver in Africa.
Getting a response from people, positive or negative, seems to be helping though: "it's allowed me to understand how other people perceive our band and essentially how they perceive those really specific situations I'm talking about".
"In the matches against him, I went through a lot of different emotions and things that allowed me to understand what I need to do to become a better player and to win against him and win grand slam trophies".
I imagine photons on my sofa absorbing all colors except for grey and appreciate science for what it has allowed me to understand, and what it now challenges me to do: to keep discovering weird facts and to develop new theories to explain the quirky and not yet tangible parts of the universe.
